Help & Support

Setting up a print client

If you want to be able to submit print jobs via lpd-serv.cam.ac.uk you need to satisfy certain basic requirements.

(1) You need to register your machine with Unix Support.: Please contact us by email to unix-support@ucs.cam.ac.uk. Just tell us the name of the machine submitting the print requests and an administrative contact email address, in case there are problems with it.
(2) You should only print from accounts that use CS identifiers.: This is an unfortunate constraint and arises from the way the printing protocol handles error messages. If any error messages are generated from a print job then the print server (our machine) emails the errors back. Unfortunately, the email is sent to a constructed address involving the local userid and the originating machine name which is typically not a valid email address. As a consequence, we use a rewrite rule on lpd-serv.cam.ac.uk's email system which rewrites user@machine.inst.cam.ac.uk into user@cam.ac.uk. This catches the vast majority of all cases. We don't object to the occasional exception generating an invalid mail address, but we don't want it to spiral out of control.
(3) You must configure your systems to know about the new print queue.: It is best to use your own system's tools to build the local printer configuration. Here are some worked examples on various platforms: