[Solved - of sorts] CUPS printing problems

[Aaron Konstam]

On Fri, 2006-04-21 at 21:55 -0500, Jeff Vian wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-04-21 at 12:36 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> > Jeff Vian wrote:
> > > In each of the location stanzas of the type above I added another
> > > "Allow From x.x.x.x" line with the IP of the remote workstation.
> > > Now when I restarted cupsd I can print from the remote workstation.
> > > 
> > > This is at best a work-around and I need to find out why it cannot be
> > > configured this way using the cups interface (or file a bug because it
> > > cannot).
> > 
> > My conclusion when modifying CUPS some time ago
> > was that I could _not_ make all necessary changes
> > through the web interface.
> > I had to make some modifications "by hand" in /etc/cups/ .
> > 
> > I'd be interested to know if I was correct.
> > 
> I can confirm that I was forced to make changes in cupsd.conf by hand to
> allow any thing but the localhost to print to my printers by cups.
> Once I set the browse option to allow the other machines to see the
> printers, and then set the Allow From option to allow the local network
> to connect I am able to print from other machines on my local network.
> 
> It seems the cups web interface only is designed to configure local
> printing and has no options to set things to allow anything else on the
> LAN to use the printer.
> 
> This is definitely something that needs to be improved to allow new or
> non-technical users to configure printers for network use, not just on
> the localhost.
> 
Well this is RTFM time. This is the way cups works fpr networked
printing. All printers are configured on the server. Then in the
file /etc/cups/client.conf on the line ServerName you place the name of
the server. No printer configuration is done on the clients.

This is all that is needed if we are talking about networked printers
that are not locally attached to any machine. One does not do remote
printer configuration with the web interface. If all the clients are on
the same LAN you don't even need the line in the clients.conf file.

One more thing, no matter what you friends say stay away from
system-config-printer.

-- 
Aaron Konstam <akonstam at sbcglobal.net>