Adding a permanent ICTprintservice queue to Solaris

Adding a permanent print queue for the Solaris printing system can be done in several ways - one is to use GUI tools like the Solaris Print Manager (printmgr) or admintool which are only useful if they are installed, while the other method which will always be available on any Solaris installation is to use the lpadmin command and this will be described here.

Using lpadmin

First you need to create the queue - Solaris puts a 14 character length limit on printer queue names so shortening ICTprintservice-mono to ICTprint-mono would be a good idea:

/usr/sbin/lpadmin -p ICTprint-mono -v /dev/null

Now you can add a description of the queue with:

/usr/sbin/lpadmin -p ICTprint-mono -D "ICTprintservice mono queue"

Next you need to specify the printing script that will direct print jobs to the network:

/usr/sbin/lpadmin -p ICTprint-mono -m netstandard

Now you specify the destination, the protocol used to communicate with it and a timeout all on one line:

/usr/sbin/lpadmin -p ICTprint-mono -o dest=ictprintservice.cc.ic.ac.uk -o protocol=bsd -o timeout=5

The final step using lpadmin is to tell the print system about the print job and printer types; the content type is postscript while the printer itself is regarded as a PostScript printer, type PS:

/usr/sbin/lpadmin -p ICTprint-mono -I postscript -T PS

At this stage the print queue is configured but not yet enabled.

Enabling and testing the new print queue

Two separate commands are actually used to enable the queue to accept printing jobs and then to forward them to the printer itself:

accept ICTprint-mono
enable ICTprint-mono

Finally, it's worth checking that the underlying printing service is actually running, especially if your system has not been configured to print before: you can check this with the ps and you should see a response like:

ps -ef | grep lpsched | grep -v grep
    root 28182     1  0 17:28:25 ?        0:00 /usr/lib/lpsched

if is is running. If it isn't and the ps query returns nothing, you need to start it with:

/etc/rc2.d/S80lp start
Print services started.

Now you can check that the new queue has been created and is running:

lpstat -p ICTprint-mono
printer ICTprint-mono is idle. enabled since Thu Feb  2 15:54:15 GMT 2006. available.

Now try submitting something to the print queue - printing the print subsystem's own /etc/printers.conf file would be a good test page:

lpr -P ICTprint_mono /etc/printers/.conf

and you can go to the ICTprintservice printer of your choice and if all is well, print the test page.

It didn't work - no documents were waiting for me at the printer

If you are unable to retrieve your print copy, make sure that the username you are logged in as on your computer is a valid college username for which you have the correct, matching ID swipe card. You may have more than one computer account on your system for which only one is linked to your college ID, or you are using a private machine or research cluster whose usernames do not match the college-wide usernames. In that case you will not be able to print to the ICTprintservice printers unless your login account is altered or another one set up with a username that matches your primary college username.