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Printing to a NetGear printserver

This describes how to set up a Solaris 2.7 machine to print to a Hewlett Packard LaserJet 4ML connected to a NetGear PS105 Print Server.

The LaserJet 4ML is a postscript printer, so I didn't need to do anything fancy with ghostscript to be able to print postscript output.

I set up the IP address of the print server using the supplied software, plugging an NT laptop into my network temporarily to do this. It is possible to set up the server using TFTP, but I went for the easy option.

You need to be root to perform this task.

# lpadmin -p laser -v /dev/null

Create a printer named laser and associate it with the device /dev/null.

# lpadmin -p laser -D "LaserJet 4ML"

Set the description of the printer.

# lpadmin -p laser -i /usr/lib/lp/model/netstandard

Set the interface program for the printer to the standard script for network printers.

# lpadmin -p laser -o dest=ps313620:l1 -o protocol=bsd -o timeout=5 -o nobanner

set the network destination for the printer. This address ps313620:l1 is made up of two parts: ps313620 is the host name of the print server on my network (in this case it is the factory default name for the print server), and l1 refers to the parallel port on the server. The PS105 only has one port, but other models have more.

The nobanner option gives the user the chance to leave off the banner page, but the default is still to print them!

# lpadmin -p laser -I postscript -T PS

Set the content type to postscript, and the printer type to PS.

# cd /etc/lp/fd
# for filter in *.fd
> do
> name=`basename $filter .fd`
> lpfilter -f $name -F $filter
> done

This sets up all available printer filters. This isn't specific to the printer just added, so it only ever needs to be done once.

# vi /etc/lp/interfaces/laser

Change the line that reads nobanner=no to nobanner=yes

This disabled banner pages on the printer. On a home network where the printer is a few feet away, these just waste paper.

# accept laser

Allow queuing of requests to this printer.

# /usr/bin/enable laser

Allow the printer to print queued requests.