Sidebar: Using the SunOS 4.1.2 Spooler under Solaris 2.3
In my lab I have seven Sun SPARCstation 2's, five SPARCstation
10's,
and a SPARCstation 20 running Solaris 2.3 on which I
have installed
the BSD-style spooling system from SunOS 4.1.2. These
systems access
four printers, one on a Solaris 2.3 host and three on
a network. One
of the network printers directly supports the BSD lpd
protocol,
the other two are Apple LaserWriters accessed using
CAP (Columbia
AppleTalk Package) via a Sun SPARCserver 690MP running
SunOS 4.1.2.
This setup has been in place for over four months. The
printers are
very heavily used in this lab (image processing) and
work like a charm
now.
The procedure for retrofitting the SunOS spooler system
is fairly
simple:
1. Disable the System V spooler if you installed
it when you built your Solaris systems.
2. Make the spool directories in /var/spool.
3. Create and install an appropriate /etc/printcap
file.
4. Copy the following binaries from a SunOS 4.1.2
system to an appropriate place on your Solaris 2.3 systems:
cancel,
lp, lpc, lpq, lpr, lprm, lpstat,
pac. (Note that lp is just a link to lpr.)
5. Setup and enable the BSD spooler system.
I include in Listing 3 a script that does steps 1, 2,
and 5. In Listing
4 is a script that handles the spooler startup at boot
time. It is
installed in the /etc/rc2.d directory by the script
in Listing
3.
My experience is only with binaries from a SunOS 4.1.2
system that
have had patch 100305-07 applied. I know of no reason
why binaries
from later releases of SunOS would not work as well.
|