LPRng-HOWTO: 17 Jan 2003 (For LPRng-3.8.20)
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# 12.16. Single Printcap File for Large Installation

One of the major problems faced by administrators of large sites is how to distribute printcap information. They would like to have a single printcap file either distributed by a file server (NFS) or by some other method such as `rdist`. By using the `server` and `oh` tags, information for the specific sites can be separated out. For example:

        # printcap
        pr1:lp=pr1@serverhost1:oh=*.eng.site.com,130.191.12.0/24
        pr2:lp=pr1@serverhost1:oh=*.eng.site.com,130.191.12.0/24
        pr1:lp=pr2@serverhost2:oh=*.admin.site.com
        pr2:lp=pr2@serverhost2:oh=*.admin.site.com
        pr1:server:oh=serverhost1.eng.com:lp=/dev/lp:tc=.common
        pr2:server:oh=serverhost2.admin.com:lp=/dev/lp:tc=.common
        .common:sd=/usr/local/lpd/%P

The above example has some interesting effects. The `pattern` is used as a glob pattern and is applied to the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of the host reading the printcap file. For example, `*.eng.site.com` would match host `h1.eng.site.com` but would not match `h1.admin.site.com`. Thus, the effects of the first couple of entries would be to specify that the `pr1` and `pr2` printers on the `eng` hosts would be `pr1@serverhost1`, and on the `admin` hosts would be `pr2@serverhost2`,

Also, the lpd daemons on `serverhost1` and `serverhost2` would extract the additional information for `pr1` and `pr2` respectively, overriding the common `lp` entries.

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