Administering Network Printers

A network-attached printer is a hardware device that is connected directly to the network. A network printer transfers data directly over the network to the output device. The printer or network connection hardware has its own system name and IP address.

Network printers often have software support provided by the printer vendor. If your printer has printer vendor-supplied software, then use the printer vendor software. If the network printer vendor does not provide software support, Sun supplied software is available. This software provides generic support for network-attached printers. However, this software is not capable of providing full access to all possible printer capabilities.

The terms “attached” and “network” refer to the way printers are connected to the world.Neither of these terms imply local or remote. Sometimes, these terms are used interchangeably, due to the fact that local printers and attached printers tend to be the same. However, the terms local and remote refer to print queue configuration. The terms, attached and network, refer to the physical connection of the printer hardware only, not how the print queue was configured.

For information about setting up a directly attached and network printers, see Setting Up Printers on a Print Server (Task Map).

For information about using over-the-wire network printing protocols for printing on the network, see Using Printing Protocols in the Solaris Release.

Scheduling Network Print Requests

Each print client communicates directly with a print sever over the network. The communication is done between the requesting command, such as lp, lpstat, cancel, lpr, lpq, or lprm, and the print service on the print server. This communication reduces the print system overhead on client–only systems, improving scalability, performance and accuracy of data.

Print servers listen for print requests with the Internet services daemon (inetd). Upon hearing a request for print service from the network, the inetd daemon starts a program called the protocol adaptor (in.lpd). The protocol adaptor translates the print request and communicates it to the print spooler, and returns the results to the requester. This protocol adaptor starts on demand and exits when it has serviced the network request. This process eliminates idle system overhead for printing. This process also eliminates any additional system configuration for network printing support as was the case in previous versions of Solaris printing software.