About SunLink Server Printing Services

SunLink Server printing offers the following features:

• Clients can browse the network for available network printers. The browsing function is available from Network Neighborhood, the Add Printer Wizard, and from the Print Setup wizard of Windows NT and Windows 95 applications.

• As an administrator, you can administer SunLink Server print servers, printers, documents, and printer drivers remotely.

• As an administrator, after your first client installs the printer, you do not have to install printer driver files on other Windows NT and Windows 95 client computers to enable them to use a SunLink Server print server; this installation happens automatically because the driver is installed on the printer driver share. If all printing clients are running Windows NT or Windows 95, it only is necessary to install printer driver files in one place--at the SunLink Server print server.

• Clients can print to all networked printers that have their own direct Ethernet interface and have been configured as SunLink Server system printers.

You cannot share a printer that is connected to a Solaris system that is not running SunLink Server software.

SunLink Server Printing Terms

In SunLink Server terminology, a shared printer queue is the mechanism through which a collection of print devices is accessed by LAN users with appropriate permissions. A print device is the actual hardware that produces printed output. Print devices can be connected directly to the server (via parallel port), to the network (via a network adapter card), or to a client computer on the network.

The Solaris operating environment, which your SunLink Server computer runs, provides LP Printer functionality that mediates between the SunLink Server system, which sends clients' print requests to the LP service, and the print devices to which the LP service directs the requests. Users access print devices by sending their print jobs over the network to shared printer queues, which in turn forward the jobs to print devices.

In Windows NT terminology, a printer is the software interface between the operating system and the print device. The printer defines where the document will go before it reaches the print device (to a local port, to a file, or to a network print share), when it will go, and various other aspects of the printing process.

In SunLink Server terminology, the shared printer queue is the software interface between the application and the print device. When you administer a SunLink Server print server from Windows NT, a "printer" actually represents a shared printer queue.

A printer driver is a program that converts graphics commands into a specific printer language, such as PostScript. When you add a printer, you are installing a printer driver and making the printer (shared printer queue) available on the network by sharing it.

A print server is the computer that receives documents from clients.

Spooling is the process of writing the contents of a document to a file on disk. This file is called a spool file.

The SunLink Server program supports all of the print devices that the local spooling system supports. The local spooling system is the process that runs on the SunLink Server computer's Solaris system, which handles system printing.

Network-interface print devices have their own network cards; they need not be physically connected to a print server because they are connected directly to the network.

SunLink Server Network Printing

The SunLink Server program supports true network printing. When Windows NT and Windows 95 clients connect to a correctly configured SunLink Server print server, the printer driver is automatically installed on the client computer.

If you install a newer or different printer driver on a SunLink Server computer or a Windows NT or Windows 95 client computer, you must update the printer driver manually to have the new version copied on to your computer. You remove and then add the printer to download the printer driver automatically.