Sidebar: Using the SunOS 4.1.2 Spooler under Solaris 2.3

In my lab I have seven Sun SPARCstation 2's, five SPARCstation 10's, and a SPARCstation 20 running Solaris 2.3 on which I have installed the BSD-style spooling system from SunOS 4.1.2. These systems access four printers, one on a Solaris 2.3 host and three on a network. One of the network printers directly supports the BSD lpd protocol, the other two are Apple LaserWriters accessed using CAP (Columbia AppleTalk Package) via a Sun SPARCserver 690MP running SunOS 4.1.2. This setup has been in place for over four months. The printers are very heavily used in this lab (image processing) and work like a charm now.

The procedure for retrofitting the SunOS spooler system is fairly simple:

1. Disable the System V spooler if you installed it when you built your Solaris systems.

2. Make the spool directories in /var/spool.

3. Create and install an appropriate /etc/printcap file.

4. Copy the following binaries from a SunOS 4.1.2 system to an appropriate place on your Solaris 2.3 systems: cancel, lp, lpc, lpq, lpr, lprm, lpstat, pac. (Note that lp is just a link to lpr.)

5. Setup and enable the BSD spooler system.

I include in Listing 3 a script that does steps 1, 2, and 5. In Listing 4 is a script that handles the spooler startup at boot time. It is installed in the /etc/rc2.d directory by the script in Listing 3.

My experience is only with binaries from a SunOS 4.1.2 system that have had patch 100305-07 applied. I know of no reason why binaries from later releases of SunOS would not work as well.