Printing to a Jet Direct card

[Mike Brodbelt]

Michael Gerdts wrote:

> 
> 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.

I use lprng with Samba here for all our printing requirements. I serve
11 networked printers via Samba, for about 50-60 users. All the printers
are networked via HP JetDirect interfaces, either internal, or external
JetDirect print servers. The lpd on HP JetDirect card works fine, and if
you want to use it, you should be aware that two queues are provided,
named "text", and "raw". I've found that using ifhp is better though -
most HP cards listen on port 9100, with the exception of the external
multi-port JetDirect cards. I have several 3 port cards, and they listen
on ports 9100, 9101, and 9102, each port corresponding to the
appropriate external parallel interface on the card. These ports will
only be active if a parallel device is connected to the appropriate
external port.

My only complaint is that, as yet, Samba doesn't support
auto-downloading the print drivers to NT clients. On that note, I've
heard about the spoolss code in development - apparently this is working
in the head branch. Can anyone point me to some docs that explain
exactly what capabilities spoolss will add to Samba, as I've been unable
to find any.

HTH

Mike.