SUMMARY:getting rid of status page on laserjet 4M+

From: Rob Allan (rob.e.allan@hydro.on.ca)
Date: Wed Feb 22 1995 - 23:15:39 CST


The original post:

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We just got a laserjet4M+ printer to use with our network of sunOS machines.
I was able to get it going off of the serial port with no problems.
Then we decided to try the network card. We then got it working
over the network using lpd. Basically, the suns think the printer
is another workstation and spool the print jobs off to it. So far
so good. The problem is that the laser jet prints out a job status
sheet after every printjob. Setting "sh" on our printcap did not
help.

I could find nothing in the manual about this and none of the front panel
menus seems to control it either.

Has anyone been able to kill the status page. I'd hate to keep the printer
chained to a workstation when we could put it on a drop and get ethernet
speeds, but I don't want to kill all those trees :(

Thanks for any help,

------
Rob Allan
Ontario Hydro
700 University Ave. H11 G26
Toronto, Ont. M5G 1X6
Tel. (416) 592 4195 Fax (416) 592 4966
EMail: Rob.E.Allan@hydro.on.ca

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The best solution came from Mattias Zhabinskiy (mattias@txc.com). It is included
below. Basically the SunOS lpr sets the banner on by default. You have
to turn it off using "sh" on the local printcap. Of course, the problem is
that I have no control over the laserjet's local printcap.
If you print with "lpr -h" the banner page is suppressed.

I tried it and the banner page went away. I should have figured this
out by myself but I thought the banner page was being forced by
the laserjet and not by lpr.

I think I'll be aliasing the lpr as suggested by Matt, we already
do this for shutdown on our database machines so the databases go
down cleanly.

Other suggestions were to download the hp netowrk printing software.
I think that is overkill for our situation, the less software I load on our
systems, the less time I have to spend admining it.

thanks for all the quick responses.

------
Rob Allan
Ontario Hydro
700 University Ave. H11 G26
Toronto, Ont. M5G 1X6
Tel. (416) 592 4195 Fax (416) 592 4966
EMail: Rob.E.Allan@hydro.on.ca

Here is Matt's reply:

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Hi Rob,

I had the same problem with laserjet 4SiMx.
If You'll look at lpr.c (I got it from FreeBSD sources)
You'll notice that by default lpr banner's page
option is on. To disable it You've to use lpr -h.
Also banner page is turned on by -J and -C options.
There are several ways to avoid it.

1. You can compile BSD's lpr and
replace with it original Sun's lpr
on all workstations, which will use
this printer.

2. You can use lpr -h option, which solves
the problem for Sun workstations. You can
create an alias for lpr or You can rename
system lpr to smth. like lpr.orig and create
your own lpr which will call lpr.orig with
-h option and without -J and -C options.
This have to be done on all workstations, which
will use this printer.

3. You can use HP's free available software
hpnp, which You can download from their ftp
site. hpnp allows to disable banner page.
It can be loaded on each workstation,
or on the some of them. In the latest
case workstations without running hpnpd
will have to use ones with hpnpd as print servers
(of course if You want to get rid of the banner page),
i.e. all print jobs will be sent first to the
workstation with hpnpd and it'll transfer it
to the printer.

Best Regards,
Matt

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