Shared printer setup?

[curaga]

I was thinking of getting a printer and then sharing it in my network. Comments welcome.


The server would be cups + hplip. Will probably build custom versions to get rid of dbus, it's not a hard dep on either. Sadly appears can't get rid of python with hplip.

The clients would be as simple as possible - busybox lpr. The only configuration to do on the client would be to set the env var PRINTER to the ip of the server.


IMHO, having to install cups and/or drivers on the clients would be incredible waste of space compared to this setup. Anyone see any gotchas I probably have missed?

[Juanito]

You'll most probably need ghostscript/ghostscript_common, but otherwise it looks like it should work.

[hurricane]

I share a printer on my network, but each user does have their own driver installed. I didn't think it was that big of a deal, and it was easy to do it this way.

[netnomad]

you can configure cups in the cups.conf
i guess that your users should be in the same group,
so all users can share the printers without any complicated configuration.
after changing the configuraton you should restart the cups-server,
to load the new settings.

[curaga]

Haha, it took a while

Anyway, now I have this thing set up just like I planned. TC with a dbus-less light cups, almost pythonless, acting as a print server. With all clients needing nothing more than busybox lpr. No drivers, nothing to configure. Just works.

I like that a setup this light was still possible to do.

Notes:
- cups-lpd is run by tcpsvd, as user lp
- do not buy a printer that needs the HP blob if you can avoid it, took me two weeks to work around the thing
- pdf printing failed by default. Had to manually build pdftops in the cups source and edit mime.convs to enable it.
- default cups.conf used, no access to the web interface from lan
- had to build GS too, due to a dbus dep

[Juanito]

well done - hopefully this will spare many the "cups misery"

how about user tc rather than lp?

[curaga]

It's intentional, why would the remote printing clients need access to tc's files?

[beerstein]

Hi:
I am using cups,  ghostscript/ghostscript_common, hplip 2-7. I do not have a cups.conf. I only can see a cupsd.conf and a printers.conf. The printers.conf carries all the printer info of the local installed printers from the server.
The clients do not need any printer setup. They dont even need the cups server running. (That´s what I think but I am not sure) The cups server allows you to set it up as "cups client only server config" This automatically turns off all other cups servers running within the network which means that you can not have another local printer runnung on the remote PCs.

netnomad mentioned in his post: "...... should be in the same group, so all users can share....."
Question: Where do you configure this group? In which config file? It is probably not the samba group - or?

I discovered one problem: On some clients (remote Pcs) I can see the printer on the server in localhost:631. I even can print a testpage, but the printer on the server does not show up in my applications such as leafpad, abiword etc. I have no idea why?