Managing Printing Services (Overview)

This chapter provides information about managing printers in the Solaris environment.

This is a list of the overview information in this chapter.

• What's New in Printing?

• Printing in the Solaris Operating Environment

• The LP Print Service

• The Solaris Print Client-Server Process

What's New in Printing?

This section describes new printing features in the Solaris 9 release.

Changes to LP Scheduler (lpsched)

In previous Solaris releases, the lpsched process was automatically started at system boot time whether or not there were local printers configured on the system.

In this Solaris release, the lpadmin command automatically starts the lpsched process when local printers are added to the system and stops it when the last local printer is removed.

This change does not alter either the use of or the administration of the print subsystem from the perspective of print clients. The lpsched process is not running on systems that do not have local printers configured. This situation does not effect the ability to print nor the ability to configure new printers.

USB Printer Support

You can use Solaris Print Manager to set up a USB printer that is attached to a SPARC or x86 system with USB ports.

The new logical device names for USB printers are as follows:

/dev/printers/[0...N]*

When you add a USB printer to a printer server, select one of these devices for a USB printer under Printer Port on the Add New Attached Printer screen. For more information on using Solaris Print Manager to set up printers, see Chapter 4, Setting Up Printers (Tasks).

Although the new Solaris USB printer driver supports all USB printer-class compliant printers, a list of recommended PostScript™ printers is in the usbprn(7D) man page.

The usbprn driver is compliant with non-PostScript printers that use third-party PostScript conversion packages like GhostScript. You can obtain conversion packages from the Solaris Software Companion CD, available at http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/binaries/package.html.

For information and cautions about hot-plugging USB printers, see the Notes and Diagnostics sections of the usbprn(7D) man page.

Managing Printer Information With LDAP

You can manage printer information in the following name services in this Solaris release:

• LDAP

• NIS

• NIS+

• NIS+ with Federated Naming Service (xfn)

• files

Keep the following in mind when managing printer information in the LDAP name service:

• If the LDAP server is the Netscape™ Directory Server (NSDS), the default distinguished name is cn=Directory Manager. If the LDAP server is Sun™ Directory Server, the distinguished name might be something like cn=admin, dc=xyz, dc=com. Solaris Print Manager uses the ldapclient command to determine the default LDAP server name. If more than one server is specified, the first one server is automatically selected. For more information, see ldapclient(1M).

• Solaris Print Manager always displays printer entries from the current LDAP server. If this is not the domain's LDAP master server, the list of printers displayed might not be the current list of printers. This is because the LDAP replica server might not have been updated by the master server, and so, is out of sync with the master. Replica servers can have various update replication agreements. For example, a change is made on the master, the replica servers can be updated immediately or updated once a day.

• If the selected LDAP server is a LDAP replica server, any updates are referred to the master server and are done there. This situation again means that the printer list could be out of sync with the master. For example, a deleted printer might still appear in the displayed printer list until the replica is updated from the master.

• Users can use the LDAP command line utilities, ldapadd and ldapmodify, to update printer entries in the directory, but this method is not recommended. If these utilities are used, the user must ensure that the printer-name attribute value is unique within the ou=printers container. If the printer-name attribute value is not unique, the result of modifications done by Solaris Print Manager, or the lpset command, might not be predictable.

Where to Find Printer Tasks

Printing in the Solaris Operating Environment

The Solaris printing software provides an environment for setting up and managing client access to printers on a network.

The Solaris printing software contains these components:

• Solaris Print Manager, a graphic user interface, provides the ability to manage printing configuration on a local system or in a name service.

• The LP print service commands, a command line interface used to set up and manage printers on a local system or in a name service. They also provide functionality that extend beyond the other print management tools.

Even if you do use Solaris Print Manager to set up printing, you will have to use some of the LP commands to completely manage printing in the Solaris environment. For more information, see Chapter 5, Administering Printers (Tasks).

The limitations of Solaris print software include the following:

• No support for print servers defined as s5 (the System V print protocol) in previous Solaris releases.

• No print filtering on print clients.