Friday, September 30, 2011

CentOS 6 lpadmin generic postscript printer addition

It really took a while for me to figure out how to add printers via the command line using lpadmin on CentOS 6. So, this information also will apply to newer Fedora users as well as RHEL 6 users:

For generic LPD/LPR Postscript print server:
lpadmin -p printer_name -m drv:///sample.drv/generic.ppd -v lpd://your_print_server/raw1 -D "Your printer description" -L "Your printer location" -o printer-error-policy=retry-job -o printer-is-shared=false -E


For generic LPD/LPR PCL print server:
lpadmin -p printer_name -m drv:///sample.drv/generpcl.ppd -v lpd://your_print_server/raw1 -D "Your printer description" -L "Your printer location" -o printer-error-policy=retry-job -o printer-is-shared=false -E

For Jetdirect/RAW print servers
lpadmin -p printer_name -m drv:///sample.drv/generic.ppd -v socket://your_print_server:9100 -D "Your printer description" -L "Your printer location" -o printer-error-policy=retry-job -o printer-is-shared=false -E

The new part is "drv:///sample.drv/generic.ppd" as the model instead of "postscript.ppd.gz" or similar from the past. This seems to trigger a ppd file build from the script/file of "/usr/share/cups/drv/sample.drv" as part of the cups package.

Notes:
I don't like the default option of not retrying failed jobs. It's a dumb default IMHO! The "-o printer-error-policy=retry-job" is a better choice.

I also tend to turn off sharing as a general rule. You may want it on, however. The "-o printer-is-shared=false" turns off printer sharing.

The Jetdirect/RAW printer socket can change for print servers with multiple ports. First port is 9100, second is 9101 etc. The same kinda process exists for the LPD/LPR print server where "raw1" will increment for printer port as a generic rule.

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