This is often an area of confusion especially with network printers that have onboard network cards. You can create a print queue to a network printer, and when you send a print job you can sometimes get up to three banners printed.
What you should notice first is that the banners may have subtle differences in appearance. A Solaris banner will look like this:
######### User: alices@hostname ##### Title: /etc/release ##### Date: Fri 17:23 Sep 07, 2001 ##### Job: banana-286 #####
This banner page is produced by the netstandard interface file. Any other banner of any other design is not being produced by the Solaris print subsystem.
You can produce banners via an application or more likely by the onboard network card of a printer. You can disable this from the printer's own display panel, connect to the printer via a web browser (by hostname or IP address if http is enabled on the card) or even by telnetting to the network card itself. It is a simple procedure -- consult the vendor's documentation for further details.
Solaris banners can be manipulated in a variety of ways:
1. When the printer is created for the first time. In my experience it is better to follow the syntax below when putting in banner information at this stage (note I have included 2 -o entries):
# lpadmin -p banana -o protocol=bsd,dest=hostname -o banner -v /dev/null .....
This means that the banner will be permanently enabled; a regular user will not be able to disable it. However, the root user can disable the banner.
# lpadmin -p banana -o protocol=bsd,dest=hostname -o nobanner -v /dev/null .....
The banner is optional and can be disabled at the user's discretion as they submit a print job:
# lp -d banana -o nobanner ......
The above syntax will prevent a banner from being printed.
2. To edit a queue already created:
# lpadmin -p banana -o banner [banner enabled permanently]
Or
# lpadmin -p banana -o nobanner [banner can be suppressed by user]
3. From the netstandard interface file itself: You need to edit the interface file for the print queue in question. For example:
/etc/lp/interfaces/banana
Note that banana is the name of the print queue you are using. Within this file you will notice the entry:
nobanner="no"
Thus to disable the banner, you must change this to:
nobanner="yes"
This actually means "yes, I do not want a banner." It can get rather confusing! The final step takes precedence over the former two methods.
For Solaris 8, 9 and above, there are some undocumented ways of configuring banner pages.
Create a print queue as normal, but check out the new banner syntax:
# lpadmin -p banana -o protocol=bsd,dest=hostname -o banner=always -v /dev/null .....
There are three options you can select:
banner=always - This means that the banner is always on and can only be overridden by root.banner=optional - This means that the banner can be selected to print or not and can be selected by all users.banner=never - This means that the banner will never be printed and can only be overridden by root.This new feature means that it is now unnecessary to edit the interface file to prevent banner pages from being printed. The best way to understand which is best for your particular situation is to test all the configurations and get a feel for what works with what. This new feature does not apply to pre-Solaris 8 releases.