I am posting this short record of my fight to configure a cups print server and print client over the last week, If you don't care about this topic just skip this message. The horror story started last Monday when I had configured a FC3 print server to allow printing to 6 HP printers. All were configured using the CUPS web interface using the lpd protocol. The client was configured using the Automatic Configuration of printers on a client by not doing any configuration on the client except placing the name of the print server in the /etc/cups/client.conf file on the client. It was working as far as I could tell to print text. ps. and pdf files. Tuesday at 10 am the roof fell in on my configuration. No printing worked from the client. Worst of every entry in the CUPS web interface list of printers said: To configure this printer use system-config-printer. Also most of the entries in the configuration had been destroyed, in particular, the device driver for the printers had been changed. Well the CUPS system administration document says automatic configuration of client printers is not supported by LPD printers. So why did the system work the day before. Well the documentation is old or in error. Automatic Configuration works for LPD printers under CUPS. Ok that was not the problem. Eventually, I found that is you set up printers using the CUPS web interface and then open up system-config-printer there is a good chance that your CUPS web configurations will be ruined. This happened to me three times so believe me it can happen. I would rename system-config-printer so it can't be executed. The final matter is really not a mystery but in my frustration of having the system self-destruct I messed up the cupsd.conf file. I know no one else would do the stupid things I did :-) The cupsd.conf file needs the following two entries made. The rest can be ignored most of the time: <Location /> Order Deny,Allow Deny From All Allow From <the address of your subnet> <-- formats given in the file. </Location> and Listen <name of your server> <-- formats given in the file. On the client client.conf should contain the line: ServerName myhost.domain.com <-- name of print server. As I said before this is the way to configure print servers and clients, once you understand what you are doing. For example, we have about 50 print clients. Now when we add a new printer to the server we need do nothing on the clients and printing will work. -- ------------------------------------------- Aaron Konstam Computer Science Trinity University telephone: (210)-999-7484
