The FNS Printer Namespace

The printer context is not part of the XFN policies. It is provided in FNS in order to store printer bindings.

FNS provides the capability to store printer bindings in the FNS namespace. This gives print servers the means to advertise their services and allow users to browse and choose amongst the available printers without client side administration.

Printer bindings are stored in printer contexts, which are associated with organizations, users, hosts, and sites. Hence, each organization, user, host, and site has its own printer context.

The printer context is created under the service context of the respective composite name. For example, the composite name shown below has the following printer context:

org/doc.com./service/printer

The name of a printer for a host, deneb, with a printer context might look like this:

host/deneb/service/printer/laser