Printing to a Jet Direct card

[Michael Gerdts]

On Tue, Apr 04, 2000 at 08:47:45AM +1000, Roberto Mello wrote:
>   I had a great headache to get this going here, untill I read an article
> on Linux Gazette that explained about Jeet Direct cards.
>   We have 15 Jet direct card with their own IP addresses. You setup samba
> normally but the secret is in the /etc/printcap file. You have to tell the
> GNU/Linux LPD to send the job to a remote queue (the Jet Direct box, which
> has a LPD built-in) and send to the right queue in the Jet Direct
> (rp=raw).
>   Here's an example of an entry in my /etc/printcap file:

Alternatively you can use lprng (http://www.astart.com/lprng/LPRng.html)
with ifhp (same page) instead of the standard BSD lpd.  The problem with
using the lpd that is built into the jetdirect cards is that you have to
have enough RAM in the printer to accomodate the largest job that you
intend to print.  If you use lprng with ifhp, you can tell it to talk to
port 9100, which will require (I think) only enough memory for one page.
What's more, status information is sent back to the print server so that
you can tell if your job is making progress, whether the printer is out of
paper, etc.

lprng and ifhp are fairly stable... since January 1, about 30 printers that
I manage with it have printed about 25000 jobs (over 60000 pages).  During
this period I cannot think of any time that I have put into troubleshooting
printing problems.  While we currently don't do NT printing through Samba
(netware... ugh!), Samba does support lprng.  

Mike

-- 
Mike Gerdts
UNIX Systems Administrator
Computer-Aided Engineering Center
University of Wisconsin - Madison