Overview of Solaris IPP Support

IPP is an application level network printing protocol that can be used for distributed printing though the use of Internet tools and technologies. The protocol was initiated to provide universal solutions for printing documents from the Internet. IPP is employed by several system and printer vendors because the protocol includes tools that are necessary to make a broad set of standard requests and receive standard responses from print client systems. IPP provides versioning, extensibility, and security, as well as enhanced functionality, including improvements in job and printer status retrieval.

IPP support in the Solaris release is comprised of client-side support and server-side support. Both the client-side and the server-side support share some common elements, as well as elements that are unique to either client or server operations. IPP client and server support shares a base code that implements some of these common components. Server-side support for IPP is available, starting with the Solaris 10 3/05 release. Client-side support was introduced in the Solaris 10 5/08 release.

With IPP, you can perform the following tasks:

• Find out about a printer's capabilities

• Submit print jobs to a printer

• Determine the status of a printer or a print job

• Cancel a previously submitted print job

• Hold, release, and restart print jobs

• Modify print jobs

• Move print jobs between queues

• Accept, reject, enable, and disable print queues

• Modify and delete printers

IPP includes a simplified model for printing that abstracts the various facets of real world printing solutions. This model uses objects, attributes, and a set of operations that are performed against these objects. IPP uses these abstracts to communicate information between print service consumers, or customers, and print service providers in a detailed, standard, extensible, and secure manner.