Technical data

6.2.1.2 Setting the Printer Connection Method
Printer hardware can be attached to a supervisor host in several ways.
Desktop and mid range printers typically have one or more connectors on
the back that allow them to be connected to their source of data such as a
host, a terminal server, or a network. Such a connector, and the hardware
it connects to, is called the printer interconnect.
For some printers, interconnects are hardware options that customers
purchase separately, and are not always the same for a printer model. For
other printers, the possible connections are known and fixed. Examples of
physical interconnects include:
• RS-232 serial
• Centronics parallel
• Ethernet
Some physical interconnects have variants, such as unidirectional and
bidirectional. Some support link-layer protocols, such as TCP/IP, or session
layer protocols such as bsd or lpd.
With the print system, the term connection methods refers to the set
of ways in which the server process can communicate with the printer
output device. The printer-connection-method attribute specifies the
appropriate connection method to be used with the printer. The supported
set of connection methods are:
• serial
• parallel
• ip-socket
• digital-printserver
• bsd
One supervisor can support multiple output devices using several connection
methods simultaneously.
If you do not specify the value of printer-connection-method, the
pdspvr supervisor selects a value based on the following:
1. If the value of printer-address is of the form /dev/lp<n>, then the
connection method is parallel.
2. If the value of printer-address is of the form /dev/tty<nn>, then the
connection method is serial.
3. If the value of printer-address is not /dev/something, then the connection
method is ip-socket.
6–6 Creating and Managing Queues and Printers