On Sep 20, 2007, at 8:20 PM, Miles Bader wrote:
I run a debian machine at work where all the printers are "network
attached" (some are hanging off of unix machines, some have their own
print server builtin).
Windows machines seem to find all these printers "magically", but none
of the debian printing systems I've tried (CUPS, LPRng) has ever
worked
worth a damn in this environment -- they don't seem to find printers
advertised on the net like windows machines do, and even adding
printers
to /etc/printcap (with lprng) doesn't work like the documentation says
it should.
What I do is go to the CUPS web interface, add a printer, and then
give CUPS the network address directly. For example, if it's a
network-attached printer at 192.168.12.12, I put in "socket://
192.168.12.12" (for Jetdirect-style print servers) and then proceed
from there. This nearly always works, although sometimes finding the
correct driver is tricky.
For printers on UNIX hosts, you probably want to use lpr:// with the
host's address in the URL. Of course, the host has to be configured
to allow remote printing, and you'll need to know the queue name.
Auto-discovery in CUPS has *never* worked for me. From what I can
gather it only works under very specific circumstances:
- The remote printer is *also* connected to a CUPS server
- The CUPS server is set to advertise its printers via broadcasts
- The CUPS client is set to accept broadcasts and the listening port
isn't blocked
So basically you have to have a homogenous installation with no
firewalls. Often distribution security policies result in CUPS'
listening port being turned off or blocked. I know this is true of
Ubuntu, which has a "no open ports" policy.
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