How do I set up a network printer or print server?

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Printing FAQ

Some material is very old and may be incorrect today

© September 2009 Anthony Lawrence

How do I set up a network printer or print server?

Updated September 2009

LPR/LPD printers

Of course Unix/Linux systems know how to print to these. SCO called them "Remote" printers, but LPD (RFC1179) is what they meant (though uncheck the "extended protocol" unless the printer is on another SCO box).

In the absence of a printer config tool, you can easily add lpd printers to /etc/printcap - there's lots of information here about that.

Even Windows can print to LPD, but you have to install "Other Network File and Print Services" from "Add/Remove Windows Components". Windows can also be an LPD server; you need "Print Services For Unix" to get that.

Direct socket printers

HP printers, Netgear print servers and others often use direct socket printing. To print, you simply send data to a specific network port: 9100 for HP, 9101 for the second printer on a HP multiport print server, 4010 for Netgear and so on. There's no protocol, headers, trailers - whatever you send, the printer gets.

Linux/Mac

With CUPS, you can do this right from the command line:

sudo lpadmin -p laserjet6L -E -v socket://10.1.36.221:4010 -m laserjet

In that case, we want to call our printer "laserjet6L" and it lives at 10.1.36.221 on port 4010 (that's a Netgear Printserver).

You can do the same thing on OS X if it fails to find your printer by itself.

SCO (System V)

If your printer does LPD, you set it up as a Remote Printer.

If it does not, see the example of using "netcat" at How do I install a HP Network Printer or Print Server?. You'll need to know its IP address and /Jeffl/portnumbers.html.

Windows

Windows has a very strange setup for this. You'd logically think that you'd choose "Network Printer", but no, you need to choose "Local" and then create a new port, choosing TCP/IP as the port type. If this is a port 9100 printer (HP), that's "Generic"; otherwise you choose the port in the advanced configuration.

Perl

You can send data straight to any port printer:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use IO::Socket;
$host=shift @ARGV;
$port=shift @ARGV;
$socket=IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr=> $host, PeerPort=> $port, Proto=> 'tcp',
Type=> SOCK_STREAM) or die "Can't talk to $host at $port";

while (<>) {
print $socket $_;
}
close $socket;

Netcat

On Linux/Unix/OS X, you could also use "nc" for the same purpose. "cat yourfile | netcat printer_ip_address 9100", for example.

For old SCO, see Where do I get "netcat" and how do I use it?

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