Printing from inside a WPAR

Resolving The Problem

Printing from inside a WPAR is supported with restrictions. Because there are no physical devices inside a system WPAR, printers cannot be local. You cannot connect parallel or serial printers directly to the WPAR. Because the global environment can manage local printers, and remote printers work inside the WPARs, you can use them. If you only have a parallel or serial printer, then:

1. In the global environment:

a. Connect the printer to the appropriate port (parallel or serial).
b. Install the appropriate software and device drivers.
c. Create a print queue.
d. Add the WPAR’s host name to the print server: Add Print Access for a Remote Client.
e. Start the print server.

2. Inside the WPAR:

a. Create a remote print queue where:
Name of QUEUE to add: The WPAR’s queue name
HOSTNAME of remote server: The host name of the global environment
Name of QUEUE on remote server: The global environment’s queue name

After creating the print queue inside the WPAR, you can see its status with the command shown below

# lpstat

Queue Dev Status Job Files User PP % Blks Cp Rnk
------- ----- --------- --- ------------------ ---------- ---- -- ----- --- ---
PScript @brak READY
PScript PSe READY

For system WPARs with shared read-only /usr and /opt, install the print software and drivers at the global environment level and then synchronize it with the WPARs. For system WPARs with private read and write /usr and /opt, you must install the printing software and printers’ drivers inside the WPAR. Managing queues inside a WPAR is otherwise similar to regular AIX. Application WPARs use the global environment’s print queues. Manage them as regular AIX at the global environment.

Bare in mind that by default, WPARs do not have the PV_DOM_SELF privilege. This is something that will be needed for qdaemon's setpcred to succeed.

The way you'd go about adding that privilege is going to the golbal environment and run the following:

stopwpar <name of wpar>
chwpar -S privs+=PV_DOM_SELF <name of wpar>
startwpar 53nk

You will have to run 'enable <queue name>' to make sure the print queue is up.

Link for the redbook:http://www.mi.fu-berlin.de/wiki/pub/Tec/ArtLehreSystemverwaltung2010/WPAR-sg247431.pdf