Subject: <none>

From: James Kempf <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 22 Jul 2000 00:43:08 -0700

We've been working on a wireless printer discovery daemon that uses SLP
(specifically mini-SLP) to discover printers capable of printing using
the LPR protocol. Currently, we're working with a provider of Windows printer
drivers for the LPR protocol to come up with a solution for Windows laptops.
We have a prototype working, and are refining it. This is primarily for
internal Sun use, but we are thinking about doing a trial deployment at
IETF once we get it solid, so people could print from their laptops, as
a kind of way to show that SLP has arrived and can do some really cool things.

We would now like to find out if anybody would be interested in porting this
solution to Linux. This baseline code is not very Windows specfic. The only
real Windows specific part is a call to a Windows registry function to
set a registry property with the list of available printers. This would have
to be replaced by code that modified the /etc/printcap file to make the
appropriate printers available. Ideally, modifications should be made to
the nsswitch so that it could use SLP as a location option in nsswitch.conf,
but we're just trying to do a quick hack. Also, I don't know if KDE and
GNOME have their own printer location mechanisms, if so, those would need
to get told about the SLP available printers (presuming it's not too hard).

Is there any interest in this? Does anyone have a simple Linux printer
discovery solution using SLP that we could offer at IETF in addition to
the Windows driver?

		jak

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From: David McCormack <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 22 Jul 2000 09:33:51 -0400 (EDT)

> a kind of way to show that SLP has arrived and can do some really cool things.
Myself and Evan Hughes are presenting a paper on how to the topics we 
see as roadblocks to SLP mainstream usage.  It will cover how we made an 
IPP(Internet Printing Protocol) implementation SLP aware, and also how SLP 
can be used in a wireless network (IEEE 802.11), to perform a wireless 
slide presentation.

As for linux, all the work we have done is in linux, and the works we 
have made will be GPL(Or some similar license), and placed back into the 
linux community for all to use.

~dM!