Printing is one of the essential services provided by computer systems. Users want reliable and easy to use methods of printing that require a minimum amount of effort to used and understand. On single user systems with a directly attached printer they perceive that the printing process is simply a matter of storing or spooling a file, and then transferring it to the printer in a timely manner. In the classical multi-user systems, each user expects to share a common printer with one or more users; the print spooling system provides arbitration and sharing of the printer among the various users. In a network based multi-user system, there may be one or more printers shared by multiple users on many different systems. The print spoolers will need to cooperate to provide print services to the users in a simple an predictable manner.
The LPRng print spooler software was developed to be robust, reliable, secure, scalable, and portable. It has been used since 1988 in extremely demanding academic printing environments such as University of Minnesota, MIT, and Rutgers, commercial companies such as Dow Jones and Abbot Pharmaceuticals, as well as being distributed with Linux, FreeBSD, and other systems. Each of these environments has a unique set of problems, demanding various configuration and administrative capabilities. For example, the simple single user system with a single or limited number of printers requires easy configuration and simple diagnostic procedures, while the network based printing system requires highly robust error logging, authentication, and failover support. LPRng provides a highly flexible configuration system that allows it to perform optimally in all of these environments.
The LPRng software has three components: the lpd print spooler and the user client applications lpr, lpq, lprm, etc.; the IFHP print filter (ifhp) which is used to convert jobs into a suitable for a particular printer, and the the LPRngTool Graphic User Interface (lprngtool) which provides a simple and easy to use configuration and monitoring tool for the LPRng print spooler.
LPRng mimics many of the features of the vintage or legacy Berkeley (University of California - Berkeley) Line Printer (LPR) package found on Berkeley derivatives of the Unix operating system. LPRng will print a document with little or no knowledge of the content or special processing required to print the document on a stand-alone machine or in a distributed printing environment. New (as compared to Berkeley LPR) features include: lightweight lpr, lpc and lprm programs, dynamic redirection of print queues, automatic job holding, highly verbose diagnostics, load balancing queues; enhanced security (SUID not required in most environments), and easy configuration.
LPRng started life at the
University of Waterloo in 1986 as PLP (Public Line
Printer), a replacement for the original BSD lpd code. This was a one-shot effort by
the author, Patrick Powell, to develop freely redistributed
code without the restrictions of the BSD/AT&T license
and would allow non-licensed sites to fix and patch
problems. From 1988 to 1992 individuals and groups added
features, hacked, slashed, and modified the PLP code,
coordinated largely by Justin Mason (<jmason@iona.ie>) who
started the LPRng mailing
list.
In 1992 while at San Diego State University Prof. Powell redesigned and reimplemented the PLP code and named the result LPRng. The goals of the LPRng project were to build a server system that was as close to user abuse proof as possible, that would provide services limited only by the inherent capacities of the support system, RFC1179 compliant, and with extensive debugging capabilities to allow quick and easy diagnostics of problems.
In 1999 the code base for LPRng was again reorganized in order to provide a common method for running on non-UNIX platforms such as Microsoft Windows NT, Apple Rhapsody, and embedded systems.
As a side effect of this work, many security problems that could develop were identified and steps taken to ensure that they were not present in LPRng. For example, LPRng clients such as lpr, lprm, lpc, and lpq can run as ordinary users programs, the lpd server can run as a non-root user once a network port has been opened, and all text formatting operations done by LPRng use a very restricted and highly secure version of the snprintf function.