Remote printing -- BSD to SYSV

[Mike J. Fuller]

In article <MITCH.89Dec7102805 at hq.af.mil> mitch at hq.af.mil (Mitchell..Wright) writes:
>kowalski at svax.cs.cornell.edu (Jeffrey Kowalski) writes:
>
>>Is is possible to remote print to a SYSV printer from a BSD printer?
>> [ ... ]
>The problem is that the System V machine does not have lpd running.  It
>probably doesn't have it at all.  To allow such remote printing, there are a
>few things that you can do...
[ ... ]

This is what I did: get the source to the BSD lpr facilities from
somewhere like uunet.uu.net and apply the patches that were posted to
the network a while ago to get it to run on SysV.

To access a printer called "foo" on a SysV machine called "bar", use a
printcap entry like:
foo:\
	:lp=:rm=bar:rp=foo:sd=/usr/spool/foo:\
	:lf=/usr/spool/foo/foo-errs:mx#0:rs:

And on the SysV machine, assuming that you installed the BSD lpr
facilities and also have lp working correctly:
foo:\
	:lp=/dev/null:sd=/usr/spool/foo:\
	:of=/usr/bin/lp:lf=/usr/spool/foo/foo-errs:\
	:mx#0:rs:sb:sf:sh:

This is necessary because the patches (at least the ones I got) are
really only intended to allow your SysV machine to print to BSD
machines.  ie., it cannot actually print to a printer attached to a
serial port.  However, if lp is working correctly, you can just pass
the file to lp and let lp deal with it.

Yeh, I admit that it's a kludge, but I have abused the output filter
field much worse than that.  I have one output filter that is a script
that copies the file to the default decnet account on a vax running
VMS and issues a remote command to print it and delete it.  I know one
machine where they use a similar method to access MVS printers.

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| Mike J. Fuller |Internet: mikef at sarah.lerc.nasa.gov     |You'd be paranoid, |
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