A thermal printers and printing methods are provided. The pin has, at its end portion that lies opposite the one designed for connection to the bone portion, a protruding tab that can be accommodated by elastic forcing in a respective cavity formed in the supporting element so as to produce a stable coupling configuration between the pin and the supporting element. The roof panel also includes a secondary trough positioned laterally outboard of the primary troughs that defines a base surface that is substantially aligned with the global runoff curvature. A sending-side edge node inputs the packet to the VPC corresponding to its destination by referring to the IP addressVPC mapping table.