HP-UX System Administrator's Guide: Overview HP-UX 11i v3 (B3921-90011, September 2010)

Remote Spooling
You can also send print requests to a printer configured on a remote system, using remote spooling.
When you use remote spooling, a shell script (“pump”) sends data to a remote system via the
rlp command.
A remote spooling program (a daemon called rlpdaemon), running on the remote system,
receives data and directs it into the remote system’s spooler. rlpdaemon can also run on your
local system to receive requests from remote systems. Remote spooling is carried out by
communication between the local spooler and the remote spooler.
If some of your systems have printers configured and others do not (but all systems are
networked), you can have the systems share use of available printers. To do so, set up the spoolers
of the systems lacking printers to automatically send print jobs via the network to the spooler
of a system equipped with the printer.
The rlpdaemon program runs in the background of the printers system, monitoring the incoming
network traffic for remote print requests from other systems. When these requests arrive, the
rlpdaemon submits them to its local spooler on behalf of the remote user.
In addition to handling remote print requests, rlpdaemon handles cancel and status requests
from remote systems, using special interface scripts much like printer interface scripts.
Configuring a remote printer into your spooler requires that you supply the following additional
information beyond what you supply to configure a local printer:
name of the system with the printer
interface script to use when issuing a remote cancel request
interface script to use when issuing a remote status request
printer name, as defined in the spooler of the remote system
To configure remote spooling, see HP-UX System Administrator’s Guide: Configuration Management.
Network Printing
Network Printing refers to printing to a printer that is directly connected to the network, usually
via an HP JetDirect interface card or built-in network connectivity. This is different from remote
spooling in that another computer is not involved.
Printer Model Files and Interface Files
Printer interface files are special script files used by the spooler to communicate with the printers
during the actual printing of a print job. These interface files are very specific to the type of
printer they are sending data to and they can be customized, for example to provide unique
banner/separator pages.
HP-UX provides a library of sample files corresponding to most HP printers (or printer families)
-- examples: laserjet”, colorlaserjet”, “PCL5 -- and some sample files corresponding
to generic printer families (for example “postscript”).
When you set up a printer in the line printer spooling system (whether through a tool like the
System Management Homepage or directly by using the shell based lpadmin command), you
specify a printer model script to be associated with the printer you are setting up. A copy of the
specified model script (one of the previously mentioned sample files) is copied from the /usr/
spool/lp/model directory into the /usr/spool/lp/interface directory (which is actually
a symbolic link to the directory /etc/lp/interface
5
where the copy will physically reside).
5.
Because everything under the /usr mount point is supposed to be treated as read-only and the contents of the
interface directory are supposed to be editable. See /usr in the section Key HP-UX Directories.
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