Help!!

I am about to go insane! Linux can be great, but sometimes the sheer effort in getting what should be a simple task working can be a real turn off.

My problem - I wish to print via an lpd client on a Slackware 10.0 box to a printer installed on a red hat 9.0 box. Both are running cups. Raw printer driver. I can send test data from Slack to Red.

I have "enabled" cups-lpd in inetd.conf on Slack and in xinetd.conf on Red, as per instructions in man cups-lpd.

Alas, if I try lpd -d okidale /etc/passwd on Slack, I get the following error message :

Status Information, attempt 1 of 3:
sending job 'root@thebitch+423' to okidale@localhost
connecting to 'localhost', attempt 1
cannot open connection to localhost - No such file or directory
Make sure the remote host supports the LPD protocol
Waiting 10 seconds before retry
Status Information, attempt 2 of 3:
sending job 'root@thebitch+423' to okidale@localhost
connecting to 'localhost', attempt 1
cannot open connection to localhost - No such file or directory
Make sure the remote host supports the LPD protocol
Waiting 10 seconds before retry
sending job 'root@thebitch+423' to okidale@localhost
connecting to 'localhost', attempt 1
cannot open connection to localhost - No such file or directory
Make sure the remote host supports the LPD protocol

(okidale is the printer, thebitch is the Slackware box)

I can successfully run this on the Red Hat Box, progs2, which is physically connected to the printer.

Any ideas?

well, the lpd command (/usr/sbin/lpd) is for LPRng. NOT CUPS.

True enough...

But cups EMULATES lpd, using a daemon called cups-lpd. This is to be launched from inetd, and requires a modification in inetd.conf, which I have made.

I have had this working about 6 months ago, but have obviously forgotten some finer details.

Thanks for your input

If the sever (redhat) is configured fine all you need to do is put the server address in /etc/cups/client.conf of slack and use lp or lpr (make sure those are sybolic links to lp-cups and lpr-cups and not to lp-lprng) and you will print.
DO lpstat -v (link to lpstat-cups) and slack should output the red-hat printer.