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I was trying to get Dell 3130cn printer working with Jetadmin in Solaris. But, I was not able to create the print queue even though the printer was reachable, SNMP was working and so was telnet. Fortunately, there is a workaround I found somewhere on the Internet. Of course, I failed to keep the link to the workaround. Anyways, the non-HP printer that you are trying to configure has to have Jetdirect card. The workaround:

1. Take an HP Jetdirect printer that you already have configured.
2. Edit /etc/hosts file on the print server and add entry with Dell printer name. The IP address for that entry has to be the one belonging to the working HP printer.
3. Add a print queue as you normally would.
4. Remove the /etc/hosts file entry.
5. Test printing.

Of course, this assumes that you have some sort of name resolution mechanism in place such as NIS, so the printer names get resolved properly. Also, your /etc/nsswitch.conf file has to specify that /etc/hosts file is the first place the server goes to when resolving names.

The /etc/hosts file entry temporarily overrides your global name resolution mechanism. This way you can create print queue with the Dell printer, but you are actually talking to the HP printer when creating the queue. You might also want to use generic network printer driver in Jetadmin. Anyways, I got that Dell printer working. Continue Reading

I needed to build a print server and I had to use HP Jetadmin. I also wanted to use the Containers technology for the job. Here are few things I found out in the process. This was done on Solaris 10 08/07 and Jetadmin version E.10.34.

I did a little bit of searching, and all I found were conflicting reports: it should work, it does not work, it works, but not really…

First of all the container that will host Jetadmin has to be full-root, as Jetadmin install will put some files into /usr/spool. I suppose it would be possible to work around it and use sparse-root, even though it might be a little messy.

The problem I ran into was while creating print queues using hppi tool. During the process mknod command is called to create printer device file in /dev directory of the container. You can not use mknod inside a container and creation of the device file will fail. Sure enough, greping for mknod in Jetadmin’s admin directory yields the following:

bash-3.00$ grep mknod *
addptrtoq:         mknod $DFILE c 13 2

Closer look at addptrtoq reveals the following:

HPNPMODEL=$HPNP/sh/hpnp.model
#DFILE=$HPNP/etc/$SPOOLNAME
DFILE=/dev/$SPOOLNAME
if [ ! -c $DFILE ]
then
mknod $DFILE c 13 2
fi
chmod 666 $DFILE

So to get around the problem, first you manually have to create the special file in the global zone inside /dev directory of the print server container. Then you can proceed with installing the printqueue using hppi tool.

bash-3.00# cd /export/home/zones/prtsvr/dev/
bash-3.00# mknod laser c 13 2
bash-3.00# chmod 666 laser

Now you should be able to add a printer queue without any problems. So Jetadmin works just fine inside Solaris 10 Container. For me, anyways… Continue Reading