LPD For Fun and MP3 Playing

poop writes "Most true Unix geeks will recognize just how nice LPD is as a distributed queueing mechanism for managing all jobs sent to the printer. But, what most people don't realize is that LPD can be used for other things too. In fact, it can be viewed as a general queueing mechanism with a few added bells and whistles for printers. So let's examine a more interesting use of LPD, an engine for distributed spooling of MP3s." Bruha points out this mirror.

Comments

So?

[ayf6]

The real beauty of this would be if he had written a "print" driver that would allow a remote PC running windows to queue up a song thus utilizing lpd to be a "music" server rather then just an mp3 player hack.

Re:So?

[L0C0loco]

Well imagine this interfaced to a website where you can browse the available material and "print" tracks to the audio queue. Rather than just playing the audio locally, it adds it to the webacast audio stream you are listening to (a queue for each stream). You can easily monitor the queue/streams from the same website - all without needing to mess with a database. It would also be easy to have a background "DJ" script loading the queue periodically with randomly selected tracks with a low priority. That way a real user can easily jump ahead in the queue with thier request. Plus you can see who requested what. Personally, I'd rather muck around with a mysql db, but some others may find this useful and it does seem like a lot of functionality ready to use.

Re:So?

[DeadSea]

Its pretty easy to send a file to a unix print queue from Windows: http://gccprinters.com/support/doc/lprutil.html

lpd generic wrapper libs in C/C++/Java/...?

[hrbrmstr]

Anyone have any links to some libraries or projects that might use lpd as a transport for generic queueing? Seems like a nice, language-agnostic, non-complex mechanism for cross-system job scheduling, etc. No real security model (though one could adapt something to it), but cool and readily available nonetheless.

Given what one can do with ghostscript queues, this is not exactly rocket science, but it goes to show the flexibility of *nix once again.

Been there, done that

[dpokorny]

This is something I did about five years ago when MP3s where just starting to become popular. It included writing a front-end in Java that was served via an Apache web server on the music host.

It was actually quite successful and kept my house in 24x7 music for about four years. Unfortunately, I retired all of my lpd-based printers and started using CUPS, so I also killed the mp3 queue too.

lpd is nice?

[timeOday]

I don't much like lpd. To me it is one of those crufty old programs that never seems to work right, never gives informative error messages, and whose configuration is arcane. Other nominees: ntp and sendmail. (And yes, I'm sure they're all wonderful once you've mastered them).

Responsible Reporting

[nurb432]

Slashdot REALLY needs to start being more responsible and contacting these people first..

Sure, report news as needed, but before *linking* ASK them if they can deal with the load.. or the cost after being hit hard..

This is getting really bad, and i can feel a 'anti-slashdot' movement growing over this sort of thing.

If I accidentally print an MP3...

[fobbman]

...will it do something like this?

Securitah Warning

[cjsnell]

Beware, these scripts appear to be vulnerable to to un-escaped shell command characters (ie ', ", &, etc) in the filename. The script does not do any validation of the file that is sent to it. Since LPD doesn't do any authentication by default, be very careful about running this stuff on a public-accessible machine.

Chris