My ideas for a new printing system

[Kyrre Ness Sjobak]

tor, 03.02.2005 kl. 17.42 skrev Remco Poelstra:
> Hi,
> 
> Let me first introduce myself, sine you people probably never heard 
> about me :).
> I'm a student at the Eindhoven University of Technology. With a team of 
> 4 students we are responsible for Linux support at the faculty of 
> Electrical Engineering.
> 
> Tim Waugh asked me to help thinking about a new printing solution, as a 
> reply on a mail of me on the config list.
> I read the posts here about that subject and I would like to share my 
> opinion on this matter:
> 
> First I would like to state that there won't be any solution if CUPS 
> doesn't improve.
> 
> The problem that eggcups tries to adress (authentication) isn't solved 
> if there is a chain of CUPS servers involved. If CUPS can't communicate 
> back, then the user still can't authenticate. So CUPS should implement a 
> 2-way IPP protocol.
> Then eggcups can be reduced to listening to HAL messages in order to 
> display the print queue and pop up authentication dialogs. By not 
> implementing a full CUPS server, it has less system resource usage, 
> which is a good thing I think.
> Second if CUPS supports signed browse packets, than we have an 'easy' 
> solution of identifying fake printers on a large network.
> 
> For the configuration part: gnome-cups-manager does quite a nice job on 
> this.
> Than we only need some decend tool to configure the server itself.
> 
> Just my 2 cents,
> 
> Remco Poelstra

Another part which would make it much easier to configure for smaller
networks (ie. those without a local DNS server), and avoids disasters if
hosts named "localhost" shares printers - do a test on a recived
hostname immediatly after it is recived, check that it does look up the
correct IP - or an IP at all.

If it does not resolve - use IP adress directly instead.

Kyrre