Printing from Solaris to a Windows NT/2000 queue

by Ed Hagihara

At one job that I had previously worked at, we had a custom application on one of our Sun boxes that was created in-house that would generate reports.  That report creation would then get sent to a Solaris print queue where it would then get redirected to a Novell 4.11 print queue for actual printing.  At some point, when we were trying to phase out Novell, we had the need to redirect those print jobs from the Novell Unicon queue over to a Windows 2000 print server.  This is my rendition of some info that I've found on the newsgroups:

Basically, you’re telling Solaris that the printer is a remote printer, and you’re designating the NT machine as the print server for the printer.

The pre-requisite for this configuration is that the NT machine must be running its LPD printing service, and accepting connections on TCP port 515.  So you must first configure (or get the NT admins to configure) the LPD service on the NT machine. You can test that the NT machine is accepting connections on port 515 by typing this command on your Solaris machine:

telnet ntserver 515

...where "ntserver" is replaced by the NT server's hostname.  If your connection is refused, the NT machine is not running its LPD service yet. If you get a connection (the telnet program says "Connected to ntserver"and "Escape character is '^]'."), then the NT server is ready.

Find out the NT server's name for the printer. Then, on your Solaris machine, type this command:

lpadmin -p unixprinter -s ntserver\!ntprinter

Replace "unixprinter" with the name you want to use for the printer on your Solaris machine. This can be the same name as the NT server uses for the printer, or a different one - your choice. Replace "ntserver" with the hostname of the NT server, and replace "ntprinter" with the NT server's name for the printer (don't forget the "!" before the ntprinter name).

If you want to make this printer the default printer for your Solaris machine, type this command:

lpadmin -d unixprinter

That will add the printer to your Solaris machine, telling it to feed the print jobs to the NT server with the Unix standard LPD protocol.