Marc Hadley's Blog

Printing to an Apple Airport Connected USB Printer from Solaris

The first thing to do is work out the IP address of the Airport base station to which you've hooked up the printer. The Airport Admin utility on a Mac can help out here if you have multiple base stations but if you have only one then its likely to the same IP address that is your default gateway. To find the default gateway type (the # represents the shell prompt, don't type it):

# netstat -rn

and look for the 'default' entry.

To make sure you've got the right IP address try:

# telnet ipaddr 9100

where ipaddr is the IP address of the base station. If telnet connects then you're probably on the right track.

Next you need to configure a Solaris printer queue that points to the networked printer. It turns out that the Airport base station works pretty much the same as a HP JetDirect print server and the following commands get the job done:

# lpadmin -p hp -v /dev/null -m netstandard -o dest=airport:9100 -o protocol=tcp -o banner=never -T PS -I postscript
# enable hp
printer "hp" now enabled
# accept hp
destination "hp" now accepting requests
# lpadmin -d hp

where hp is the name of the printer queue and airport is the IP address or DNS name of the base station. The first line creates the queue, the second and third enable the queue and set it to accept requests and the final line sets this new queue to be the default printer queue. The first line will need adjusting if you are using anything other than a PostScript printer, the key parts of the command are use of tcp for protocol rather than bsd and using TCP port 9100 on the base station.

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