Re: Is lpr outdated, unsupported?, ie. lpr or lp?

From: Greg Andrews (gerg_at_panix.com)
Date: 05/12/03 

Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 19:08:34 +0000 (UTC)

jon@nytimes.com (Jon) writes:
>
>Occasionally, an lpr process hangs on our Solaris 8 system. I've
>asked Sun Support about this and they seemed to indicate that lpr is
>just included for backward-compatibility, and that I should really be
>using "lp -d" to send a job to another Solaris box. Or set the system
>up as a print server (here too lpr would NOT be used). They said that
>printing mechanisms like queue management, retries, etc. are not
>available when using lpr.
>
>Can I conclude from this that lpr is basically outdated and
>unsupported, and that lpr is not really part of "Solaris printing"?
>

You've been told the wrong thing, or misunderstood what you were told.

Do an ls -l of /usr/ucb/lpr. That's right, it's a symbolic link to
/usr/bin/lp. The same program is invoked when you run /usr/bin/lp
or /usr/ucb/lp. The program was written to see which name it was
invoked as, and behave appropriately.

The real clue to your problem is in the recommendation you received:

>Or set the system up as a print server (here too lpr would NOT be used).

In other words, you're using a remote printer configuration, but you're
not feeding the print jobs to a real print server. Instead, you're
feeding them to the network printer. This is not recommended because
there is no true print queue, nor sophisticated TCP timeouts and
re-tries. If the printer's network card (or print server box) decides
to never respond, the print job stays in the Solaris holding directory.

And this is the other reason to not use remote printer configs directly
to network printers. Some printer network cards (or print server boxes)
have bugs. The HP Jetdirect ones can sometimes lose track of one of
the network connections and never respond. When that connection is
from a Solaris machine's lp/lpr/printd process, trying to deliver a
print job, the job doesn't get delivered.

The solution is to switch to the Solaris network printer config,
which uses the netstandard interface. It holds the print jobs in
a real FIFO queue, makes just one connection to the printer at a
time (rather than several simultaneous ones - one for each print
job), and has an adjustable timeout to handle the times when the
printer's network card stops talking.

If your printer is an HP, then using HP's Jetdirect software for
Solaris will accomplish the same things with respect to queueing
and timeouts, plus give you control over the printer's extra
features, like landscape, double-sided printing, selecting paper
trays, etc.

If you post the make/model printer, and the output from the command
Lpstat -v printer-name", then I can suggest the equivalent config
that uses the netstandard interface.

  -Greg 

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