HP LaserJet hooked on Solaris
2007-12-25 9:05:00
There are some things really broken up, and it stuff from HP that causes
trouble. I experienced some hefty 40 MIO ERRORS (Ljet 4M+) and checked
some things out. My personal setup is: Solaris 2.4, with lp jumbo patch,
Jetadmin C 00.02.33 (or something alike) and a LaserJet 4M+
I personnaly set the printer IP,... via telnet, but the solutions
presented here work also with BOOTP/TFT or ARP setups.
To start with, you can still use the xjdm to supervise the status of the
printer. The only thing I did opposed to the manuals is :
- get rid of the lp-queue's
- use a less user-friendly solution
- introduce possible 'print-collisions' when people are directly sending
to the printer. This occurs only at the places where a bunch of people
rely on 1 printer. (I *don't* :) )
I *hope* the Jetadmin-stuff for MickeySoft Winslows is not that broken
up, so, the printer can be monitored from a stupid PC somewhere on the net.
What is Broken?
The hpnpf or hpnpd of HP. Most of the Sun-stuff works, in my opinion,
but heck, they *do* produce patches all the time :)
When checking the logs produced by hpnpf it appears to me that it is
flooding the buffers of the printers in one way or another. It produces
the same 40 MIO ERROR as when you us the solution HP promotes.
How?
When printing huge postscript-files the things give the 'socket
resource unavail'-alike error. Directing the test-ps-file through hpnpf is
no problem, but a print from Answerbook (via a file) for ex. craches the
printer.
Several people reported on the fact they could not print Postscript.
This due to this problem.
Solutions?
Yes there are some, but these work fine on my small home-made
LAN, where I'm sure there will be no multiple users kicking the socket on
port 9100 of the printer.
Solution 1: How to print Postscript/PCL (no ascii text!!!)?
Well, I run this one when booting :
hpnptyd -m /dev/ptyp0 -x hpjet -l /tmp/hplog
where hpjet is defined in /etc/hosts
And then use
cat foobar.ps > /dev/ttyp0
to print 'raw' material to the printer.
When printing pure ascii, I experienced some problems with the CR/LF.
The printer actually only processed the CR and not the LF.
Solution 2: How to print Ascii?
hpnpf -x hpjet -n -l /tmp/log2 /.cshrc
for ex. does the trick, while
/usr/lib/hpnp/bin/hpnpd
is running.
the -n is there to get the CR/LF ok.
These things can be found in the HP-manuals, but hey, when there are a
dozen of people using the same device, manuals get lost :)
I spoiled sone pile of paper on this, but heck, in my opinion HP should
do something about it and not the people who buy their stuff.
I can be reached at kpgoderi@etro.vub.ac.be
--
Karel Goderis
VUB - Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Personal --- kpgoderi@etro.vub.ac.be
IGUANA - Indepent Group of Unix-alikes and Networking activists
Personal --- scollie@medelec.uia.ac.be
BEST - Board of European Students of Technology
General --- twbest00@vub.ac.be
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