Migrate HPUX print queues to Linux

[Kim Kendall]

Has anyone had to go through this? Our Oracle server will be moving from HPUX to Linux (Red Hat Enterprise), and all the print queues need to move, too.

Are there any tools? Should I load CUPS on HPUX (11.0) and try to migrate there first, then save the CUPS config and move it?

[Paul Cross_1]

I recently migrated about 2000 solaris (not hpux, but I would imagine the issues are similar) print clients to CUPS using a linux cups server.
I wouldn't bother playing with cups on HPUX. Despite the name (common unix printing system) cups is very linux-centric. I wasted about 2 weeks trying to get cups to work properly with solaris on the server end and eventually scrapped the idea in favour of a linux cups server, the cups clients are fine under solaris however. Some of the issues there were: print queues mysteriously dying, cupsd dumping core, etc. CUPS can run in parallel with existing lp spoolers, so get your CUPS environment working under linux first, and then kill the HPUX server.

[Mark Grant]

If you are going from non-CUPS to CUPS then it isn't going to be easy and I don't think it's a good idea. You probably would be able to do it if you are using the "lp" scheduler by copying /var/spool/lp.

However, the idea of installing CUPS on HP-UX first is a bit of a waste of time becuase you would still have to set the printers up in CUPS and you may as well do that on the Linux box.

In a nutshell, if you are using cups on Linux (a very good idea by the way) then I would suggest you bite the bullet and re-create the queues on the linux box.

[Kim Kendall]

I can't believe that there aren't any tools that would help with migrating a printing environment from HPUX to Linux.

I can't imaging having to sit there and manually recreating 100's and 100's of print queues in a Linux environment.

I'd like to scrap the HPUX printing solution for a Linux one, but NOT if this is what I have to do to migrate to Linux!

[Mark Grant]

I think you could script this. You would need to extract the printer name, the ip address and stuff from your "lp" configuration on the HPUX machine. This can't be too difficult. names and model are in /var/spool/lp/model. The relevant ip address must be somewhere. You can script as cups configuration file from this.

[Paul Cross_1]

Scripting this is actually quite simple (or was for me because a printer inventory already existed in an excel format). I saved the excel spreadsheet as a .csv file, moved it to linux and extracted the queue name, the ppd file, the location, model, method (ipp, socket, etc), and the port number (631 for ipp, 9100 for jetdirect).

it went something like this... in perl of course!
$command="/usr/sbin/lpadmin -p $name -D \"$description\" -E -L \"$location\" -v $method://$name.company.com:$port -m $ppd";
system($command);