Adding a Printer

Adding a Printer

To send print requests to your printer, you must first add your printer by registering it with the lp spooler. The procedures for adding a printer with lp vary. The procedures are divided into the following groups, depending on the type of printer and how it is used:

Parallel and serial printers on the local system; see "Adding Parallel and Serial Printers".
SCSI printers; see "Adding a SCSI Printer".
Printers connected to remote print server systems; see "Adding a Network Print Server".
Note: The utilities described in this section, mkcentpr, mkserialpr, mkscsipr, and mknetpr, should be used whenever possible. For a list of supported printers, see the directory /var/spool/lp/model. Additionally, these utilities list the printers they support when they are executed.

Adding Parallel and Serial Printers

Silicon Graphics systems are equipped with at least one parallel and one serial port. Both ports are on the back of the workstation or server and are clearly labeled.

The special file /dev/plp is the interface to the parallel printer port. Some larger servers and workstations have multiple parallel ports. There is one parallel port on each IO4 board on CHALLENGE and Onyx systems.

If you have more than one parallel port on your system, the device files that refer to the ports are named according to the board slot in which the CPU board is installed. For example, if you have an IO4 board in slot 2 and another in slot 4, the device files for the parallel ports are /dev/plp2 and /dev/plp4. One of these devices (the parallel port attached to the board designated as the primary board) is linked to the default /dev/plp.

Normally, /dev/plp is directly accessed only by a print spooling mechanism such as the lp subsystem. The special file /dev/plp may only be opened for writing by one process at a time. However, several processes may open the device in read-only mode to find out the printer status. A printer reset is issued whenever the device file is opened for writing. For a complete description of the parallel printer interface, see the plp(7) reference page.

Parallel and serial printers are installed with a similar procedure, but to different ports. Your printer hardware documentation should detail the cabling requirements for the printer's interface. For a complete description of both types of interfaces, see "Printer Cable Pin Signal Tables". Connect the printer interface cable to your printer and to the appropriate port on the back of your workstation.

To register printers connected directly to your computer via a parallel or serial port, follow these steps:

Become the superuser with the su command.
Stop the print spooler. Type:
/usr/lib/lpshut
Choose one of the following commands, depending on the type of port your printer is attached to:
- Assuming you have a printer attached to the parallel port, use the mkcentpr utility to install the printer in the lp system. Type:
  mkcentpr
  The mkcentpr utility is an interactive script that prompts you for all necessary information about your printer and then automatically registers it. You should be prepared to specify the device file for the parallel port (/dev/plp unless you have multiple CPU boards installed) and other specific information. Consult the mkcentpr(1M) reference page for complete information about mkcentpr syntax.
- Assuming you have a printer attached to the serial port, use the mkserialpr utility to install the printer in the lp system. Type:
  mkserialpr
  The mkserialpr command is similar to mkcentpr except that it is used for the serial port. Consult the mkserialpr(1M) reference page for complete information about mkserialpr syntax.
To set up the printer as the default printer, type the following command and substitute the printer name by which the printer is known to its users for the printer-name:
/usr/lib/lpadmin -dprinter-name
To restart the print spooler, type:
/usr/lib/lpsched

Your printer is now registered with the lp system and is ready for printing.

Adding a SCSI Printer

SCSI printers are supported with the optional product, Impressario(TM). If you have Impressario installed on a non-graphics system, use the mkscsipr command supplied with Impressario to register the printer. Consult the mkscsipr(1M) reference page for complete information about mkscsipr syntax.

Adding a Network Print Server

Network print servers allow several users to use the same printer, thus avoiding the expense of having a printer attached to each workstation. In a network, printers attached to remote systems are called print servers, remote systems with print servers attached are called print server systems, and the workstations accessing the print servers are print clients, as shown in Figure 2-3.

Figure 2-3 : Print Servers, Print Clients, and Print Server Systems Print servers must be configured on the print server system before remote clients can configure them successfully across the network.

To configure a print server for use across a network, follow these steps:

Log in as the superuser to the print server system (the system where the print server is physically attached).
Replace client_name in the command below with the hostname of the client that needs access to the print server. Type:
addclient client_name
addclient grants permission for the specified client_name to access print servers across the network.

Note: The addclient command allows anyone who has access to the lp account on the print client to have the privileges of the lp account on the print server system. This means that your lp system can be modified by the client system users.
If you want all remote workstations to be able to use print servers on the print server system, type:

addclient -a
Both print client and print server systems must be able to communicate across the network. For additional information on network communications, see IRIX Admin: Networking and Mail.
On the print client, become superuser.
To stop the spooler, type the command:
/usr/lib/lpshut
On the print client, add the print server to the lp spooler with the script mknetpr:
mknetpr queue hostname printer-name
queue is the name of the printer queue and should be no more than 14 characters long. hostname is the name of the system acting as the print server system, and printer-name is the name by which the print server is known to users accessing it.
To set up this print server as the default printer, type this command on the print client, using the printer-name variable from the previous step:
/usr/lib/lpadmin -dprinter-name
Restart the spooler with this command:
/usr/lib/lpsched