Solaris the tree killer no more

In one of my earlier posts I complained about being unable to turn off the banner page for print jobs sent from a Solaris print client to a printer controlled by a Linux print server. Soon thereafter we found a solution which I have been forgetting to talk about in this space... But, as they say, better late than never.

The solution is basically to tell the server (Linux) machine to forget that banner page. The way to do that is as follows.

1) Make sure you have cups-lpd installed. Solaris seems to only speak lpd, I am not sure how one could enable it to interface to a cups server directly.

2) On our CentOS machine we had to use the following syntax in /etc/xinetd.d/cups:

service printer
{
socket_type = stream
protocol = tcp
wait = no
user = lp
group = sys
passenv =
server = /usr/lib/cups/daemon/cups-lpd
server_args = -o document-format=application/octet-stream -o job-sheets=none
}

Emphasis on the "-o job-sheets=none" part.

Solaris the tree killer

Now how's this for a fun experience - I have got this Solaris 8 machine which for some reason finds it necessary to send a title page with every print job. It does not run its own spooler and prints via a print server instead so I am clueless as to where to look for relevant setting to turn this on. So, in the spirit of waste and insanity so characteristic of our times, the machine seems poised to turn a whole forest to waste in no time as it sends quite a few print jobs.

The only configuration it seems to have is contained in the /etc/printers.conf file which looks roughly like the following:

#
# If you hand edit this file, comments and structure may change.
# The preferred method of modifying this file is through the use of
# lpset(1M)
#
caslon:\
:bsdaddr=kiev,caslon:

garamond:\
:bsdaddr=kiev,garamond,Solaris:

bodoni:\
:bsdaddr=kiev,bodoni:\
:job-sheets-default=none

_default:\
:use=gutenberg:

gutenberg:\
:bsdaddr=nrims-fs,gutenberg:

Now exactly where to tell it to knock off that title page nonsense is anybody's guess... But if you know feel free to tell me in the comments and I will be eternally grateful!