STAR's generally available printers are listed below. 

There are additional printing resources available at BNL, such as larger format paper, plotters, lamination and such.  Email us at starsupport 'at' bnl.gov and we might be able to help you locate such a resource.

Printing from the wireless network (or from offsite)

The "standard" way of printing from the wireless network is to go through ITD's CUPS server on the wireless network.  However, this has not proven to be robust, for several reasons:

1.  The wireless CUPS server has to talk to an internal CUPS server, which in turn submits the print job to a printer (or in some cases, yet another CUPS server) so there are a couple points of failure.

2.  The ITD CUPS server print queues simply stop (or disappear) sometimes, and getting ITD to restore them has been surprisingly difficult.

3.  We don't always keep the print queues updated with all of our available printers.

So, here are a couple of alternatives to using the CUPS servers that you may find handy...

1.  Use VPN.  But if you are avoiding the internal network altogether for some reason, or can't use the VPN client, then keep reading...

2.  Get your files to rcf2 and print from there.  The printers listed above all have rcf print queues.  But if you want to print to a printer for which there is no queue on rcf2, or you have to print from an application not available on rcf2, then the next tip might be what you need.

3.  SSH tunnels can provide a way to talk directly (sort-of) to almost any printer on the campus wired network.  At least as far as your laptop's print subsystem is concerned, you will be talking directly to the printer.  (This is especially nice if you want to make various configuration changes to the print job through a locally installed driver.)  But if you don't understand ssh tunnels, this is gonna look like gibberish:

Here is the basic idea, using the printer in the Control Room.
It assumes you have access to both the RSSH and STAR SSH gateways.

The ITD SSH gateways might also work in place of rssh (I haven't
tried them yet).  If they can talk directly to our printers,
then it would eliminate step C below.

A.  From your laptop:

ssh -A -L 9100:127.0.0.1:9100 <username>@rssh.rhic.bnl.gov

(Note 1:  -A is only useful if you are running an ssh-agent with a
loaded key, which I highly recommend)

(Note 2:   Unfortunately, the rssh gateways cannot talk directly to our
printers, so we have to create another tunnel to a node that can...  If the
ITD SSH gateways can communicate directly with the printers, then the
next hop would be unnecessary...)

B.  From the rssh session:

ssh -L 9100:130.199.162.165:9100 <username>@stargw1.starp.bnl.gov

(Note 1: 130.199.162.165 is the IP address of onlprinter1.star.bnl.gov -
it could be replaced with any printer's IP address on the wired network.)
(Note 2:  port 9100 is the HP JetDirect default port - non-HP printers
might not use this, and there are other ways of communicating with HP
network printers, so ymmv - but the general idea will work with most TCP 
communications, if you know the port number in use. 

C.  On your laptop, set up a local print queue as if you were going to
print directly to the printer over the network (with no intermediate
server), but instead of supplying the printer's IP address, use
127.0.0.1 instead.

D. Start printing...


If you close either of the ssh sessions above, you will have to
re-establish them before you can print again. 

The two ssh commands can be combined into one and you can create an alias created to
save typing the whole thing each time.  (Or use PuTTY or some other GUI SSH client
wrapper to save these details for reuse.)

You could set up multiple printers this way, but to use them
simultaneously, you would need to use unique port numbers for each one
(though the port number at the end of the printer IP would stay 9100).