SUMMARY: Printing without header

From: Elmar Kurgpold (ekurgpol@develop-law.usc.edu)
Date: Thu Jan 21 1993 - 00:57:49 CST


The question was:

        Is there a procedure for omitting the header page when printing from a
        PC in PC-NFS 4.0? I can't turn off the header page altogether, as my
        printer is occasionally used as a default printer by my entire
        organization. I'd rather not create a dummy entry for just PC
        clients.

(My apologies for fogetting to put hard returns in the first time)
There are a couple of answers, each of which I was aware of before. The method
I finally chose is summarized below. Although it is sort of a dummy entry, it
at least avoids having to create a second printcap entry pointing to the same
printer.

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The pcnfsd daemon has a configuration file in which you can define aliases;
you could set up an alias for each printer with a '-nh' postfix.
For example:
        printer lp-nh /usr/ucb/lpr -Plp -h $FILE

>Actually, this should read: printer lp-nh - /usr/ucb/lpr -Plp -h $FILE
                                           ^^^

--
Eelco van Asperen.           | Erasmus University Rotterdam
-----------------------------| Department of Computer Science, room H4-32
internet: evas@cs.few.eur.nl | PObox 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands

----- End Included Message -----

There were still a few drawbacks, but I found workarounds. Mainly, I needed to be able to cancel print jobs from the PC. Virtual printers created in the /etc/pcnfsd.conf file do not provide this access. However, I added the virtual printer name as an alias for said printer in the printcap, thus allowing simplified access to the queue. The only drawback is that the command "lpt d <jobid>" did not work; only the net cancel command worked. But it only worked in the format "net cancel <jobid> <hostname>:<printername>" where printername is *not* the alias name that was used in pcnfsd.conf, but the name returned by "net printers".

Another sun-manager suggested to modify the source for pcnfsd to spawn lpd with the -h option. I didn't try that because I wanted to turn off the header page for *selected* PC clients. I didn't make that very clear in my question.

Another suggestion that I thought was valuable, though it is not possible at my site, was to have the default printer send all jobs to /dev/null, which forces all users to specify a printer one way or another. Great idea for a site with tons of printers and users!

Thanks to all who responded, and thanks for reading!

_/_/_/_/_/_/ -------------------------------- _/_/ _/_/ | Elmar Kurgpold | _/_/ _/_/ | Network Administrator | _/_/ _/_/ | USC Law Center | _/_/_/_/_/_/ | ekurgpol@develop-law.usc.edu | _/_/ _/_/ | (213)740-5709 | _/_/ _/_/ | (213)740-5502 FAX | _/_/ _/_/ -------------------------------- _/_/_/_/_/_/



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