I work for a retail store in a small town. We have charge accounts for workers and truckers to come by, get what they want, sign the papers and then get back to work. That's not really a problem, but my boss wanted to have signature pads set up at the counters so that they only had to sign once instead of signing 4-6 times per trip. I thought and read on it and I figured it wouldn't be too hard, so I talked my boss into letting me try getting one running. I've had experience with C# and AutoHotKey in the past, but hardly any network experience.
I've got most of my program running right now, but it's really sparse and not very efficient because I am using a pretty unreliable way of getting the signatures. I have a computer running linux in the office that is connected to a switch. On the same switch, I have an old printer that the switch is mirroring packets and sending them to the linux computer. Tcpflow on linux, which is set to startup and run automatically, 24/7, captures those packets and saves them in a shared folder on the network. The saved packet files can be easily converted with ghostscript from Postscript to PDF format to be signed.
The biggest problem I have is that mirroring this printer is really unreliable. If the printer happens to run out of paper in the office while nobody is back there, it piles print jobs up and no longer accepts TCP packets, so somehow the switch can't mirror them and it breaks the entire process.
Sometimes the network share from linux to windows gets unmounted in linux, but that's not really what I'm looking for in this question.
What I want to know is if there is some way of simulating a printer over the network, complete with a physical IP address, that I could print to with our store server. I can't just share a virtual printer or anything because our store server is running some proprietary software on SunOS. The only way to set up a printer on this software is by using the IP address of the printer.
If any further information is required, I will be more than happy to answer, I'll be available all day so it shouldn't take too long to reply if unless something comes up. Thank you all.