[TriLUG] setting up cups

[Rick DeNatale]

On 9/21/06, Joseph Mack NA3T <jmack at wm7d.net> wrote:
> I have installed cups feeding two network printers (HP
> Laser Jet with network card and HP Inkjet parallel on a
> DirectJet box - neither of these are postscript).
>
> I can print the test page on both printers from the cups
> admin page. I can also print from firefox using ^P (where
> the two printers appear in the menu - I have no idea how
> they got there).
>
> What I can't do is
>
> lp -d printer_name /etc/hosts
>
> where printer_name is the printer name in the
> cups admin/printer pages.
>
> The cups admin page shows the job is
>
> "pending since " (date/time)
>
> and no lights blink on the printer etc.
>
> Google and google groups aren't helpful here.
>
>
>
> I have foomatic-rip and foomatic-gswrapper installed
> and a ppd file for each printer. On the admin page, the
> inkjet is a Gimp-print, while the other is RAW.
> >From the LinuxPrinting.org CUPS QuickStart page I cannot
> figure out if I need to install any other foomatic files.
>
> It's not clear to me how cups works. cupsd appears to be a
> webserver that allows you to write config files. I had
> expected that cups would be a wrapper around my regular lpd
> spooler. However there was no lpd installed with cups and
> nothing listening on port 515 when cupsd is running.
> Presumably all communication is via the cupsd port 631.

I'm not sure which distro you are running.  On Ubuntu, there are
separate packages, cupsys which provides the cupsd daemon, and
cupsys-client which provides the various lp* commands.

I don't know what port the cups version of lp uses to talk to cupsd

I suspect that /usr/bin/lp in the cupsys-client package talks directly
> What I would like is to have this machine be a spooler and
> for the other machines on the network to print to the
> spooler rather than directly to the printer.
>
> On these other print client machines do I need cups
> installed too?

You need the cups client on the client machines, and you need to set
the ServerName directive in the client config file
(/etc/cups/client.conf) to point to the server.

You also need to set up the cups configuration on the server to allow
access from machines on the network.  It uses directives much like
those in Apache.

Alternatively you can run a server with or without any locally
attached printers in the client, and tell it to browse for other
servers on the network, and it should pick up their printers.

-- 
Rick