New printer administration tool design for comments

[Arjan van de Ven]

On Fri, 2006-02-10 at 12:38 +0000, Tim Waugh wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 03:48:02AM +0100, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> 
> > what I'd like to see is a mechanism similar to automatic http proxy
> > discovery; eg allow for a "site configuration", which you pull down
> > automatic (say if dhcp points you at it) if you are in a certain
> > building at work, but not when you are at home (because then you want to
> > pull down another printer list from your local firewall box ;)
> 
> I can see two things you might mean:
> 
> a. site policy tells clients about printers in the print room

I meant this one

> I think that a. should be taken care of by CUPS browsing (2.7.2 Remote
> Discovery).

I doubt it; discovery is nice for small networks but for bigger
companies... not so, same for printers which don't by nature do
discoverable things; it also can take a long time and a lot of network
traffic. Some places turn discovery off on a sysadmin level (eg they
filter it on the router) as a result. While.. it wouldn't be hard to get
the settings from a server, especially when it's easy to do for both the
admins and the user.