.png?width=100&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale "Picture of John Savill")
.png?width=400&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale "John Savill")
Sign up for the ITPro Today newsletter
Stay on top of the IT universe with commentary, news analysis, how-to's, and tips delivered to your inbox daily.
Sharing printers between Unix and NT.
John Savill
August 30, 1999
3 Min Read
A. A. I have enclosed instructions for printing to Unix servers (almost the same as for network printers), and also how the NT machinecan be used as a gateway for 2 way printing between windows (all versions) and Unix. TheUnix use is AIX, although the others should be similar.
Setting up NT for TCP/IP printing
Login as a member of the Administrators Group
Start Control Panel
Double Click Network, and select the Services tab
Click Add, and select "Microsoft TCP/IP printing"
Click OK and then Close
Click "No" to delay reboot
TCP/IP Print server service must be set to start automatically (Start - Settings - Control Panel - Services - TCP/IP Print Server - Startup - Automatic)
Reboot the system
Adding a remote print queue
Double Click "My Computer"
Double click Printers, and select Add Printer
Select "Printer is a local printer", and then continue
Click Add Port, and select "LPR port"
Click New Port and fill in the IP address of the printer (or name from local hosts table) in the top box, enter the remote queue name in the bottom box
Click Next and then select the printer driver
Click Next and select if you want to share it, and then click Finish
To authorize prints from this NT machine, as root edit "/etc/hosts.lpd"
Add the NT machine's IP address (or name if it has an entry in the Unix machine's hosts table)
Sharing NT printers with unix machines
It is necessary to add a registry key as for UNIX to successfully pass data to an NT server the data type must be set to RAW.
Start the registry editor (regedit.exe)
Move to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesLPDSVCParameters
From the Edit menu select New - DWORD value
Enter a name of SimulatePassThrough and press Enter
Double click the new value and set to 1. Click OK
The default value for SimulatePassThrough is 0, which informs LPD to assign data types according to the control commands.
Close the registry editor
Start – Settings – Printers
Right click on printer to be shared
Select properties
Select shared tab
Select shared
Enter share name (this is what the unix machine will see it as)
Select Security tab
Select Permissions
Ensure unix users have permissions to print, either by "everyone" or "network" having permission (Print is all that is required)
Click OK
Create a queue on the unix machine as normal, for a text only print queue on aix use:
run "smit mkpq"
Select "remote"
Select "local filtering before sending to print server"
In the names section, type against ASCII
Set hostname to be hostname of the NT machine
Set queue to be share name of queue on NT machine
Set type of print spooler to be "BSD"
Press enter to confirm
Using an NT machine as a Windows - Unix print gateway
Add any unix printers you wish to share to NT machine as shown above.
Share them out as if they were normal print queues.
Add them to all the clients you wish to print to them from
Share out any clients you wish to print from on the unix machine(s) as normal
Add these shared windows printers to the NT machine as normal.
Share them out to the unix machine(s) as shown above
Thanks to Chris Griffiths for this
About the Author
You May Also Like
.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
