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Sebastopol, CA--Computers were supposed to create the paperless office,
remember? We know that's not true. The Internet has made more information more
easily available to computer users than ever before, resulting in more
printouts than ever before. "From the user's perspective, printing is still
fundamental. Paper continues to be a common way of sharing files, and paper
still forms the basis of our legal system. Most people print out agreements,
account statements, transaction confirmations and of course information found
on the Web," says Matthew Gast, co-author of the just-released
Network Printing
(O'Reilly, $34.95). "In spite of its importance, almost nothing practical has
been written about the problem of printing. Many books have been written about
narrow pieces of the problem, but nothing addresses the problem as
comprehensively as Network Printing, taking into account that real
networks have many different types of clients and printer hardware."
Recent years have also seen a proliferation in the number of platforms that
system administrators must support. In addition to the Windows operating
systems, administrators may also have to deal with Macintosh, a few flavors of
Unix (Solaris, Irix, HP-UX, and Linux), and possibly NetWare. "Print services
are typically a tangled web with a server for each client system and latent
interdependencies that can break at any time," explains Gast. "Network
Printing helps administrators untangle this growing web by unifying
services on a single platform."
Network Printing
details how to set up print servers on Unix (BSD and SVR4) and Linux systems,
and opening them up to handle printing from Windows, Apple and Novell users. It
offers thorough discussions of LPRng, the next generation spooler for Unix and
Linux; Samba's printer sharing; Netatalk, a free implementation of the
AppleTalk protocol; and ncpfs, a Linux implementation of the NetWare protocols.
The book also shows how to get printers to boot correctly on a network, using
solutions like bootp and DHCP; how to manage printers remotely using SNMP; and
how to set up a network-wide printer configuration repository with LDAP.
Network Printing is an indispensable tool for the overworked system
administrator who's responsible for making sure that documents get from the
client to the printer, no questions asked.
Online Resources:
Network
Printing
By Matthew Gast & Todd Radermacher
1st Edition, October 2000
0-596-00038-3, 304 pages, $34.95 (US)
order@oreilly.com
1-800-998-9938
Return to the: O'Reilly Press Room
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