Parallel port through the network?

[Tyler Aviss]

Just out of curiosity, what "fine" amount of detail is needed that a
good-quality print server with an LPR or other queue can't provide? My
biggest issues with killing print jobs has been more with printers
that wouldn't clear their internal memory when they started, and
needed a good old manual-poweroff to clear things up.

On 10/11/07, Evan Leibovitch <evan-ieNeDk6JonTYtjvyW6yDsg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Hey all. This is a weird one.
>
> A client is using an old mutant of Business Basic on an almost-as-old Unix
> box. I've got them set up doing most of the printing through CUPS but
> there's a problem.
>
> They were used to a feature of the Basic that allowed them to write
> directly to /dev/lpt1 (ie, the parallel port) and bypass the traditional
> SVR3 Unix print spooler. This allowed very fine ability to start and stop,
> even on large runs. While they like most of the network printing, they
> miss this feature on networked printers.
>
> Is there any way that I can set up a device (yes, it's actually looking
> for a device, you can't give it a file or program to pipe to) that would
> take its input and simply rifle the data over to the printer residing at a
> specific IP address?
>
> I'm looking right now into the possibility of using a named pipe (with a
> daemon running that listens to the pipe -- but any other suggestions are
> welcome.
>
> Last resort is a number of very long parallel printer cables. I recall
> Parallel extenders/boosters that allowed you to use regular phone cable
> for distances longer than parallel cables would normally support -- but I
> don't know if they're still being made.
>
> The printers are Printronix band printers -- the network ones are bring
> connected using DLink print servers to their parallel ports.
>
> Any help is appreciated. They are looking to move the whole thing from
> Business Basic to a LAMP platform but the printing need is immediate.
>
>
> - Evan
>
>
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