CUPS, Alpine, and printserving

[Beartooth]

On Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:20:48 +1030, Tim wrote:

> On Mon, 2008-11-03 at 22:06 +0000, Beartooth wrote:
	[...]
>>          Machines #2, #3, and #4 all show my wife's printer
>> downstairs, as well as another. (Machine #1 does not.) #2 and #4 have
>> the other, set to default, as the real machine on #1 -- though for a
>> while they kept insisting it did not exist. Machine #3 has the "other"
>> printer shown with a URI saying "file: /dev/null" -- and won't let me
>> remove it!
> 
> You might want to tell us specifically what you did to achieve all this,
> rather than just the results.  Very little fiddling should be needed
> from a fresh start, but some amount of fiddling might be needed to undo
> a pre-mangled system.

	I can't tell you, alas!,for two reasons. I would have, if I could 
remember. But I didn't keep good track; and, you might know, I did a 
whole series of things on one machine -- and then realized I had somehow 
gotten off #3 and onto #2 ...

> On a fresh system, all you should have to do is connect a printer to the
> print server computer, and let it sort itself out, or manually set that
> printer up on the server.  Or a bit of both (I renamed the automatic
> named printer settings to something less annoying).  Whichever way you
> go, once the server can print to its own printer, it's working, and
> you'd then configure the server to let the rest of the LAN make use of
> it.  That's a two-parter, allowing CUPS through the firewall (*), and
> configuring CUPS administration options related to sharing (**),

	I'm thinking a fresh start is indeed indicated, yet again -- or 
at least a nearly fresh one.

	Let me see if I have this straight. Having done most of the two 
footnoted parts above (maybe all -- I tried to), I *think* I can just go 
from client to client, deleting *all* printers (if all will let me; last 
time I tried that, as I said above, there was one that seemed immortal, 
afaict).

	If/when I get thepresent entries deleted, they will presumably 
once again find my wife's printer downstairs. They did last time, 
doubly : once as a printer and once as a fax. Does it hurt to have that 
there? Should I re-delete it, or maybe go shut her machine down (she's 
out of town) before I start telling clients to find printers?


> * On my LAN, all the PCs are trusted explicitly, so I took the easy
> option of setting the firewall to trust eth0 as a whole, rather than
> particular ports.  There's another barrier between the LAN and the
> internet.  Firewall on each PC get in the way of print serving, and also
> some print clients.  As I recall, it got in the way of automatically
> discovering the print server on the LAN.  The print server can
> periodically announce its presence, but the firewall stopped that.

	I did that, iiuc : marked both eth0 and ippp+ as trusted on all 
clients and on the server.

> ** Share out that printer to the LAN but it doesn't need sharing to the
> internet, unless you have a mixture of different isolated subnets, where
> that option will allow crossing from one subnet to another.  

	I don't have such complications -- it's all on plain LAN, without 
subnets. But I don't follow how I share it only to the LAN -- unless 
that's what trusting eth0 and ippp+ do, perhaps??

> Perhaps you might want to allow remote administration of the server,and 
> allow users
> to cancel any jobs, but that's icing on the cake, it's not needed just
> to be able to print.  

	OK.

> You may also want the server to include printers
> on other CUPS servers, if you had other ones on the premises.  But,
> again, that's not needed.  And can get messy if you have several servers
> publishing their own printers, plus republishing the other server's
> printers.

	That's the one thought that gives me pause about my wife's 
printer. We don't normally fax things, nor receive faxes; but I can 
easily imagine it becoming convenient to be able to print to one 
another's printers, for instance if one breaks down or runs out of ink/
toner/whatever. Otoh, it sounds like a large can of worms ...
 
> On the clients, you shouldn't need to do anything.  They should
> automatically find out about all the printers available on the LAN, and
> automatically list them as printable to.  This should take a few
> moments, not ages.  All you should have to do, if you had more than one
> choice, would be to pick a default.

	I haven't (yet, at least) done a thing about my wife's machine 
nor printer -- not made it either a client or a server.

> Having said that, if you're reconfiguring a system which already had
> printers configured all over the place on the clients, you'd want to
> remove all those configurations, and then let them find the servers by
> themselves, again.

	Hmmm ... Does that mean I need to go reconfigure my wife's CUPS 
in any case??

-- 
Beartooth Staffwright, PhD, Neo-Redneck Linux Convert
Remember I know precious little of what I am talking about.