Sharing printers between Fedora machines

[Tim]

Tim:
>> Make sure CUPS is running on all computers, and the clients will find
>> the server by themselves.  If all goes well, you wouldn't have to do
>> any configuration on the clients, unless you had more than one
>> printer, and wanted to choose which was the default.


Sean Bruno:
> Cups is running on both machines and the printer reports as shared in
> system-config-printer.
> 
> When I try to setup the printer on the second machine, what should I
> be looking for?

Nothing.  You shouldn't have to do anything on the client (the server is
the one directly connected to the printer).  The client'll find whatever
printers are available on your LAN, and make use of them, automatically.
When you go to print something, your printer will appear as one of the
available devices to print to.

If the clients don't behave like that, it's (most likely) the server
side of things that you need to take care of:

That it's sharing (CUPS config).  

That it's listening for connections (CUPS config).  This is verifiable
by using "netstat -antu", you should see port 631 being listened to,
send us a copy of that output.  

That the machine names are resolvable on all machines.  That could be
via a local DNS server, or just a hosts file on each machine that lists
the other machines' addresses.

e.g. If your printer server was called printserv and was at 192.168.1.1
and the client was called workbox and was at 192.168.1.2, you could have
a hosts file *like* the following on both machines:

127.0.0.1  localhost.localdomain  localhost
192.168.1.1  printserv.localdomain  printserv
192.168.1.2  workbox.localdomain  workbox

(Adjust IPs, domain and machine names to suit your own network.)

If you've previously messed with CUPS configuration on the clients, that
may be a reason that they don't automatically find a printer on the
network.  On my client, which "just worked" without any manual
intervention, the /etc/cups/client.conf is a zero byte empty file,
likewise for the classes.conf.

-- 
(This computer runs FC7, my others run FC4, FC5 & FC6, in case that's
 important to the thread.)

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