HP-UX System Administrator's Guide: Overview

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 printer’s 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.
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