Configuring Printers without SMIT

[Alan Phillips]

Our application has an interactive configuration procedure which asks the
user a number of site dependent questions.  Included in these questions are
ones about the type of printer that the user will be using (selected from a
list of supported ones) and the port to which that printer will be connected.

I want to be able to take that information and fire off the necessary commands
to create the printer device, the virtual printer, and whatever needs to be done
so that when the user then does an "lpr -P THAT_PRINTER filename" the print
job pops out on the printer.  The key point here is that I don't want the user
to have to go through SMIT to configure the printer, I want that to do the
configuration for him/her.

I have been successful in creating the printer device with "mkdev".  I can
also create a virtual printer with "mkvirprt".  Then, "lpr" seems to work
fine.  However, I can only get "mkvirprt" to work when I use it's interactive
mode.  I haven't found a combination of "mkvirprt" options that will work to do
what I want to do non-interactively.

Are there some things that I need to put in "/etc/qconfig"?  There has to be
something that I am missing in the documentation that would tell me how to
do this, but I haven't found it.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Alan
Alan Phillips 					Phone: (415) 780-4477
Network Equipment Tech., Redwood City, CA
internet: alan at bach.net.com 			UUCP: ...ames!unet!bach!alan