Detection of printers in FC4

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Fri, 7 Jan 2005 15:35:16 +0000, Tim Waugh <twaugh at redhat.com> wrote:
> Why would private printers be being broadcast in the first place?

Simple answer... misconfiguration by the person admining that box.

On a network tightly controlled by an IT department that actually
employs staff to support linux installs.. there is a clear place to go
to get that misconfiguration corrected... IT can help you sort it out
and browbeat the person misconfiguring their cups server.

But in networks where linux is merely tolerated so long as the linux
workstation does not impact the windows clients IT does support,
figuring out whom to talk to about reconfiguring the misconfigured
private printer is a chore since system-config-printer doesn't give me
any information to figure out which printer server is serving up the
que i shouldn't be seeing.  I can't walk over to the IT helpdesk
on-site and complain about someone's misconfigured cups printer, the
IT department does not touch any linux workstation install issues.

And this gets even more complicated as the network becomes less and
less centralized and more and more open.... educational nets with lots
of student machines... even if you could track down the admin of a
particular broadcasting print server convincing them to see reason and
change their configs so you don't see their printer on your box could
be a problem, with no network policy to support your request.

The question becomes... how important is it for the service detection
tools to accomedate poorly managed servers that are beyond the control
of the admin of the client machine?  On large de-centralized
networks.. like the ones I'm on at work... its somewhat important to
be able to limit on the client which cups servers im pulling printers
from lto be usable at all.  Just as its useful for the service
configuration tools to be able to ALLOW/DENY client access based on ip
address.. i think its equally useful for clients to allow/deny
browsing of broadcasting print servers based ip address of the print
server.

-jef