Configuring HPDPS to Meet the Needs of Your Users

Balancing the Use of Printer Devices

For a physical printer that will be used only by one individual or within a small group, such as a desktop printer or a printer within a small department, you can create one logical printer and one queue associated with the physical printer as shown in Figure 1-3 “Department or Desktop Printer ”. By specifying the logical printer with a print request, a user knows exactly which printer device will print a job. Access to the printer can be restricted to the appropriate personnel.

Figure 1-3 Department or Desktop Printer

For larger groups of users with similar needs, you might want to pool printer devices to more effectively handle the workload. As shown in Figure 1-4 “Printer Pool ”, HPDPS allows you to associate several physical printers with the same queue. Users specify the logical printer supporting the pool of printers as the destination for a job. The first physical printer that becomes available and that supports the job, accepts the next job in the queue. This minimizes the time users wait for their jobs to process and balances the printing workload on your system.

Figure 1-4 Printer Pool

You can also set up configurations so that you have many logical printers associated with a single physical printer, which is called a "funnel" configuration, or multiple logical printers associated with multiple physical printers in an "hourglass" configuration. See “Selecting Logical Configuration Models ” in Chapter 3 for the different types of configurations you can set up with HPDPS.

Providing Secured Access to Printer Devices

You might have some printer devices in a DCE Extended Environment to which not all users require access. As shown in Figure 1-5 “Printer Security ”, HPDPS uses the security services of DCE to allow you to restrict access to printer devices. You restrict access to a physical printer through the configuration of logical printers. You authorize access to logical printers on a user-by-user basis or by DCE user groups.

Figure 1-5 Printer Security

You can also set up your logical printer so that it does not check for authorization, making the logical printer available to all users. Because users who use LP spooler print commands are not typically logged into DCE, the printers to which they send their requests must not require authorization. See Chapter 8 “Managing DCE Security for HPDPS ” for further information.

Authorizing Access to Printer Functions

In the DCE Extended Environment, you might need to give various user groups access to the same printer device or set of printer devices, but you might want to restrict some users from using certain printer capabilities. For example, you might want to keep some users from printing on a media other than letter-sized paper, or perhaps you want to limit the number of copies of a job they can print.

You could set up two logical printers and associate them with the same queue and physical printer or printers. As shown in Figure 1-6 “Authorizing Access to Printer Functions at the Logical Printer ”, representing an hourglass configuration, one logical printer could restrict the usage to one copy on letter-sized paper and the other logical printer could be for users who have authorization to use the unrestricted logical printer.

Figure 1-6 Authorizing Access to Printer Functions at the Logical Printer

You might want to restrict users from using certain capabilities of specific physical printers. It might be the policy of your company that all jobs must be printed on two sides of the page. You can set up all your page printers so they will accept only jobs that request two-sided printing. And you might want your high speed printers to accept only large jobs, your low speed printers to accept only small jobs, and your mid-range printers to accept any size job. If a logical printer is capable of accepting the specific job, the job will wait in the queue until a printer that can accept the job becomes available. If, however, no logical printer supports the job requested by the user, the job will not be accepted. Figure 1-7 “Authorizing Access to Printer Functions at the Physical Printer ” shows how you can accommodate these policies by restricting access to printer functions at the physical printer.

Figure 1-7 Authorizing Access to Printer Functions at the Physical Printer

Supporting LP Spooler Users

If HPDPS is installed on a single system, LP spooler users will be able to directly access HPDPS printers without any further setup. The majority of users, however, will probably not have HPDPS installed on their systems, but if they are part of your TCP/IP network, they can access HPDPS printers as described below.

Using the standard procedures for setting up a "remote" print queue, the user can gain access to an HPDPS client. As a result, users who submit print requests from within applications, or with LP spooler print commands such as lp or lpstat, can route their jobs to HPDPS printers by specifying an HPDPS logical printer as the destination for the job. These users can access an HPDPS-managed printer to use the following LP spooler commands:

If an HPDPS client is installed, HPDPS translates the LP spooler commands to HPDPS commands. For detailed information, see Appendix B, "LP Spooler Commands Translated to HPDPS Commands" in the HP Distributed Print Service User's Guide.

	NOTE: When a job is submitted through the LP spooler, the user name listed as the owner of the job will be hpdps-lp-user. In order to see such jobs using the pdls or pdq commands, you will need to use the -U flag in order to suppress the default user name filter. A Basic Environment host may only access DCE Extended Environment logical printers with the attribute authorize-jobs set to false. HPDPS can transfer requests into an LP spooler on any host in your network. The administrator can configure a physical printer with attachment-type=lp-spool-hp that also names the proper LP spooler host and LP spooler destination on that host. See “Creating a Physical Printer ” in Chapter 5 for more information.