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How can I remote print from UNIX without passthrough printing?

In the terminal emulation world, such as what is supported with our Anzio products (serial, telnet or SSH), remote printing was most often done by passthrough printing, where the print job would "pass through" the terminal session to the locally attached printer. Host applications often supported this as well as the terminal client.

Other types of printing were also supported by the host application and the host itself, namely printing to a spool or queue on the host for the local printer. The UNIX could also be set to print through the LPR or LP program which could then be redirected to remote printers or remote print servers.

Print Wizard supports three types of printing that works with these approaches, Despool, LPD and Listen.

  • Listen watches for remote print jobs coming in as raw data on port 9100, similar to Hewlett-Packard's ® JetDirect protocol.
  • LPD utilizes the LPR / LPD protocol for capturing print jobs destined for a remote print server.
  • Despool, and the FTPDespool variation, watches for remote jobs posted to a specific location. While Despool watches a locally mounted directory, such as over SMB or NFS, FTPDespool can watch a remote directory over the FTP protocol.

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