I have installed Mandrake 10.2 and LPRng on a Dell PC to act as a print server between UNIX servers and Xcell Terminal servers. When trying to print to this server from a UNIX server it takes about 3 minutes to reach the printer. When I add the hostname of the UNIX server to /etc/hosts on the print server this is reduced by half. I think the problem is connected to reverse DNS lookup and wondered if there was any way to switch off dns and use static routing. Alternatively is there a way of stopping LPRng from using dns. Thanks.

Check the command route. It will probably help you.

Thanks. I can use the route command to add a static route, but is there a way of stopping dns on the Linux server?

Hope this helps: you probably have to remove the content of /etc/resolv.conf. You can also do some static ethx configuration. You can enable a dns server on the print server too. There's probably other ways but i don't know'em.

That's exactly what you just did - you created a static entry in /etc/hosts and that overrides DNS. You've already solved your problem.

Routing is a completely different thing and using the route command won't help you in this case. Routing doesn't translate host/domain names to IP addresses, it specifies where packets destined for particular networks should be directed.

Thanks for your help. Matrix printing is now ok and I will experiment with form feeds to sort out the lasers.