At the risk of being told this is a faq, i have managed to get lpr to talk
to our lw 600 which understands IP yacking from a unix machine, but i'm
not really sure how to rather make it talk to the lw IIf which is
conveniently located in my office. 

we have the following lines in our SGI's printcap file, which indicates to
me that at some stage the lw II f *was* printed to by the unix machines:

laser|LaserWriter IIf:\
        :lp=/dev/ttyd2:br#19200:rw:if=/usr/local/bin/lpacct:\
        :lf=/usr/spool/lpd/lpd-errs:\
        :af=/usr/spool/lpd/strudel:\
        :df=/usr/local/lib/psdf:\
        :fc#0177777:fs#0000003:mx#0:sf:sh:rs:
macp:\
  :lp=:\
  :br#19200:rw:\
  :if=/usr/local/bin/lpacct:\
  :rm=mackerel:\
  :rp=lp:\
  :sd=/usr/spool/atlpd:\
  :lf=/usr/spool/atlpd/lpd-errs:\
  :df=/usr/local/lib/psdf:\
  :mx#0:sf:sh:rs:

Judging from this, i looked for a device called /dev/ttyd2 to which the
lpd would presumably pass stuff which lpr was asked to print. easy enough
to see what's going on, but of course, there is no such device in
/etc/dev.

I gather i need to specify at least *some* device in the printcap file to
aim lpd/lpr at. In the case of our lw600, i did not provide a device but
entered a line 'lp:\' and in the next line stated 'rm:' and the IP
address. That worked, and it prints beautifully.

so my question is: does anyone know how to make it print to the serial
port?(or preferably the ethernet, since there is a localtalk-ethertalk
bridge between my se/30 and the printer.) Has anyone else got a situation
like this? what device should i provide for it and what connectionmethods
will work? will it work if i specify 'ae0'? I don't want to risk breaking
anything.

thanks for all the help :-)

_________________________________________________________________________
John Ostrowick
Computer Science Department, University of the Witwatersrand
1 Jan Smuts Ave, Johannesburg, South Africa. 1st Floor, Senate House 1012
Phone: +27 (011) 716-3783
jon@cs.wits.ac.za or jon@macenroe.cs.wits.ac.za or jon@is.co.za
My web page is on my server's: http://macenroe.cs.wits.ac.za/
My ftp site: ftp://macenroe.cs.wits.ac.za/public partition/
My listserv: subscr@macenroe.cs.wits.ac.za (any message with a body)