On Wed, Oct 17, 2001 at 10:51:27AM +1000, Alan E. Davis wrote: | In my high school classroom we have a small network of four linux | boxen, with private block ip addresses (our Public School System | domain is in a private block), with one printer. I have been able | to ftp/telnet between my own boxen, but I am unskilled so don't know | how much I can do with/among my colleagues who are running Windoze. | I wonder about security, but I think we are ok to at least share one | printer via our "Internet" non-internet network.
Where is the printer? Is it plugged straight into your machine (parallel, usb, serial, whatever) or is it on the network (ipp or jetdirect) or is it shared from a windows host via samba or shared via lpd (or cups/ipp) on a unix host? I like the CUPS printing system. It works well for me. Install the 'cupsys', 'cupsys-client' and 'cupsys-bsd' packages. Read the documentation that comes with cups, and if it is overwhelming come back with more details on your network/printer topology. If you have the printer and want to allow the windows hosts to use it, or it is on a windows machine and you want to use it, also install the samba package. For using a windows printer, the URI is smb://<host>/<printer name>. To share your printer with a windows machine, put "printing = cups" in the /etc/samba/smb.conf file (it defaults to 'bsd' I think) and get rid of the printcap line. Make sure a "[printers]" section exists and allows access. The samba howto has more details. HTH, -D
