The range of print clients found in a modern office or campus environment can best be described as bewildering. A system administrator may have to manage Unix, Windows, Macintosh, Netware, and other printing protocols. The authors of this book have attempted to address the situation by suggesting that a central print server be installed, and provide details of programs such as Samba, which will enable various client protocols to be accepted at that server. The authors have been working with networks and printers for so long that their suggestions are to be taken very seriously.

The book is divided into four parts, the first of which is “The Basics: Unix Queueing.” In the first few chapters, the reader can read a little about the history of printing, and then learn about common printer languages (PostScript, PCL, and GDI). There are a couple of simple examples illustrating the capabilities of PostScript. I was unable to actually make these work, until I remembered that printers are sometimes set up to require an explicit PJL language switch statement before they will accept PostScript statements. PJL is covered briefly at the end of Chapter 2.

Chapter 3 (“Exploring the Spooler”) provides good summaries, with diagrams and command illustrations, of the both the Berkeley (lpr/lpd) spooling system and the System V Release 4 (lp) printing system as implemented in Solaris 7. Both administration and user commands are covered. At the end of the chapter, there is a section (with screenshots) depicting the installation of Microsoft TCP/IP printing on a Windows NT 4.0 machine.

If you want to print text on a printer that requires CR characters, or PostScript on a PCL printer, then you will need to use some form of filter. Several useful filters are discussed in chapter 4, including a couple that can be used with HylaFAX modems and HP PPA printers. There is also an example showing usage of the APS magic filter.

One limitation of the Berkeley spooling system is that input filters can only be used on local printers. The traditional solution to the problems thereby posed has been to define a local printer with an input filter that feeds its output to a corresponding remote printer. The LPRng spooler, which is the topic of chapter 5, includes some extensions, some of which permit simplified filter invocation.

Chapters 6 through 8 constitute Part 2 of the book, “Front-End Interfaces to Unix Queues”. Chapter 6 is about the Samba program for Windows clients. While whole books have been written on this topic, what’s presented here is sufficient for most installations; however, the Web-based administration tool is not covered.

Chapters 7 (“Connecting Macintosh Networks to Unix Servers”) and 8 (“Connecting NetWare Networks to Linux Servers”) contain material which doesn’t appear in many other places. If you use the AppleTalk protocol or the NetWare print spooler, you’ll find it invaluable. There are lots of illustrations and screenshots.

Part 3 (“Administration”) also includes some information you won’t find in other books about printing. Chapter 9 shows how the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) can be used to manage networked printers, and introduces the MRTG traffic grapher and the npadmin printer-information utility. Chapter 10 shows how BOOTP and DHCP servers can be set up to automatically configure printers at switch-on. Chapter 11 provides a complete scheme for centralized configuration management using LDAP. In chapter 12 there are some perl scripts to extract actual page counts from printers for accounting purposes using both PostScript commands (via port 9100) and SNMP queries.

Part 4 contains some appendices that include standard and LPRng printcap capability tables, and SNMP MIB tables for printer management.

I have a few problems with this book. It makes no reference at all to the IPP mechanism now available on some Windows and Unix/Linux/BSD machines; in fact, it says nothing about Windows releases since NT 4.0. The Web site it cites as containing examples does not in fact contain any. But it’s still one of the best books you will find on the topic. You might also want to look at the “Samba” and “Printserving” chapters in Ted Mittelstaedt’s book [1].