Cisco IOS Cookbook, 2nd Edition

LPD Printer Support

Problem

You want to connect a printer to your router to use from the Berkeley Unix LPD print program.

Solution

You can connect a printer to any asynchronous interface on a router. This typically means your AUX port, but as we discussed in Recipe 16.6, there are several other options for asynchronous serial ports on routers:

Router1#configure terminal
Enter configuration commands, one per line.  End with CNTL/Z.
Router1(config)#printer rtlpr1 line 161
Router1(config)#end
Router1#

Discussion

The Berkeley Unix Line Printer Daemon (LPD) protocol is defined in RFC 1179. It is a relatively simple TCP protocol in which a device supporting a printer listens on TCP port 515 for inbound connections and accepts commands to do things like print a file or delete a job from the queue.

There are several prerequisites to making this deceptively simple recipe work properly. First, you must have a computer that supports the Berkeley Unix LPD print program. Second, you must correctly configure the /etc/printcap file on this computer so that it will spool print jobs to the router. Third, you must have a printer that can take a serial input instead of the more customary parallel or USB connections. And fourth, you have to figure out the line number associated with this printer connection.

We assume you have the first point under control. Any standard Linux or FreeBSD system, as well as any commercial Unix implementation such as Solaris, HPUX, or AIX, will definitely have LPD support. Microsoft ...