What's New in Printing in the Solaris 9 Release

This section describes new printing features in the Solaris 9 Operating Environment

Changes to the LP Scheduler (lpsched)

Starting with the Solaris 9 release, the lpadmin command automatically starts the lpsched process only when local printers are added to a system and stops it when the last local printer is removed from that system. In previous releases, the lpsched process was automatically started at system boot regardless of whether local printers were configured on a system. Administering the print subsystem from print clients, printing, and configuring new printers are not affected by this change.

USB Printer Support

With the Solaris Print Manager, you can set up a USB printer that is attached to a SPARC or IA system with USB ports. The logical device names for USB printers are /dev/printers/[0... N]*.

When you add a USB printer to a print server, on the Add New Attached Printer screen, select one of these devices for a USB printer under Printer Port.

The Solaris USB printer driver, usbprn, supports all USB printer-class compliant printers. See the usbprn(7D) manual page for a list of recommended PostScript printers. The usbprn driver is compliant with non-PostScript printers that use third-party PostScript conversion packages such as GhostScript. You can obtain conversion packages from the Solaris Software Companion CD, available at the following URL. http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/binaries/package.html

The Notes and Diagnostics sections of the usbprn(7D) manual page contains information and cautions about hot-plugging USB printers.

Printer Information Management with LDAP

In addition to managing printer information with the NIS, NIS+, NIS+ with Federated Naming Service, and files name services, starting with the Solaris 9 release, you can manage printer information with LDAP.

When managing printer information in the LDAP nameservice, consider the following.

• When the LDAP server is the Netscape Directory Server (NSDS), the default distinguished name is cn=Directory Manager. When the LDAP server is Sun Directory Server, the distinguished name can use a format like cn=admin, dc=xyz, dc=com. Solaris Print Manager uses the ldapclient command to determine the default LDAP server name. When more than one server is specified, the first one is automatically selected. See ldapclient(1M) for more information.

• Solaris Print Manager always displays printer entries from the current LDAP server. If this server is not the domain's LDAP master server, the list of printers displayed may not be the current list of printers. This mismatch can result when the LDAP replica server is out of sync with the master. Replica servers can have various update replication agreements. For example, when a change is made on the master, replica servers may be updated immediately or only once a day.

• When the selected LDAP server is an LDAP replica server, any updates are referred to the master server and are updated there. The printer list could be out of sync with the master until the replica is updated from the master.

• Although users can use the ldapadd and ldapmodify commands to update printer entries in the directory, this practice is not recommended. The printer-name attribute must be unique within the ou=printers container. If the printer name is not unique, modifications done with Solaris Print Manager or the lpset command may not be predictable.