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On 2004-09-23, Dominik L.. Borkowski <dom@vbi.vt.edu> wrote:

> Back to 1970's/80's and almost 90's, when we didn't have cups and lprng, aka
> unix printing hell days At the end of the day what matters most is that
> we can actually print.

Well, no argument there. If there were no LPRng, I'd sure as
hell use CUPS.

I think (for me, anyway) comparing CUPS to LPRng is like comparing
RedHat to Slackware: the former are each eminently usable, and I'd
be happy with them if not for the existence of the latter.

- --keith

- --
kkeller-usenet@wombat.san-francisco.ca.us
(try just my userid to email me)
AOLSFAQ=http://wombat.san-francisco.ca.us/cgi-bin/fom

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Lew Pitcher wrote:

> Imagine, if you will, a major business with over 1500 branch offices spread
> across North America.
<Snip>
> Now, none of this is even in the speculation stage, let alone under
> investigation. But I want to be prepared.

and of course this is all just speculative but do you think that the
savings that accrue to TDCanadaTrust will be passed along to its customers?
!
what the hell was I thinking ;-)

Lew Pitcher wrote:

>> out of curiosity, what are your circumstances?
>
> OK, now that I'm not at work, lets see if I can give you a picture of an
> opportunity. I'm not going to name names, or give corporate details, and
> this description is /purely hyphothetical/, so take it as you will...


Interesting, thanks for filling us in. Few thoughts:

a) have you considered another distribution? i'm sure you're already aware
that none of the slackware's official packages and the packaging system
support any kind of fully automagical upgrade process for config files +
services restart. That you'll have to do on your own.

b) seriously, cups documentation. This sounds like a big enough project that
requires proper research. man pages would be a good start, but they
sometimes lack all the information you may need [such as what options you
can pass to lpr for a specific printer, etc].

c) from my experience, once cups is set up, it just runs. Once every 6-12
months there may be a serious enough bug to call for a security update;
however, overall it's quite decent.

d) be sure to read up about implicit queues. With cups you can easily use
more than one server to spool for one printer, one server spooling to
multiple printers, or multiple servers spooling to multiple printers, all
transparent to the users.

e) lpadmin, lpadmin, lpadmin. that tool should be the one you need to focus
on

and thanks for sheding some light on this. it's hard to guess if what the
overall goal of a project is, judging from a few small notes.

pgp trash troll delete

Hicks, Alan
188 Shady Dale Dr
Lizella, GA 31052
478-935-8132

+Alan Hicks+ <alan@lizella.network> wrote:
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> In alt.os.linux.slackware, Keith Keller dared to utter,
>> I'd set Followup-to, but where do you followup an LPRng-CUPS religious
>> war?
>
> How about?
>
> Reply-To: dmcbride@sco.com
>
> - --
> It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise,
> Than for a man to hear the song of fools.
> Ecclesiastes 7:5
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pgp trash troll delete

Hicks, Alan
188 Shady Dale Dr
Lizella, GA 31052
478-935-8132

+Alan Hicks+ <alan@lizella.network> wrote:
> +Alan Hicks+ <alan@lizella.network> wrote:
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>> In alt.os.linux.slackware, Dominik L. Borkowski dared to utter,
>>> cups can be a real life saver, that's why i would recommend it in favour of
>>> lprng. mostly because of the samba+cups combo, which proves to be very
>>> valuable in a mixed environment [or even windows only environment].
>>
>> I fail to see how CUPS is a "real life saver" to an admin who knows
>> what he's doing. How exactly does samba and CUPS integrate in any
>> worthwhile way that LPRng and samba can't already do as well? To me,
>> CUPS breaks the Unix philosophy of having small utilities that do one
>> job and do it well. CUPS tries to do too much IMHO and does it all
>> half-assed.
>>
>>> ps) to 'advocate' cups a bit more, there is also a nice way of setting up
>>> pdf writing for windows machines, using samba+cups+ghost script. i wrote a
>>> small tutorial on it, if anybody is interested.
>>
>> Hell, why not post a link to it? FYI, pdf writing in Windows is nothing
>> new. I don't understand why you'd want to do something that complex
>> when Adobe puts out a free "print driver" for Windows that does the same
>> thing with less links in the chain.
>>
>> Hmmm... why don't you put "lprng pdf creation" without the quotes into
>> google and tell it you're feeling lucky? LPRng can do the same thing
>> with minimal configuration.
>>
>> Note: that page may not render properly in your browser. I had some
>> difficulties using Safarii.
>>
>> - --
>> It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise,
>> Than for a man to hear the song of fools.
>> Ecclesiastes 7:5
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Dominik L.. Borkowski wrote:
> Lew Pitcher wrote:
>
>
>>>out of curiosity, what are your circumstances?
>>
>>OK, now that I'm not at work, lets see if I can give you a picture of an
>>opportunity. I'm not going to name names, or give corporate details, and
>>this description is /purely hyphothetical/, so take it as you will...
>
>
>
> Interesting, thanks for filling us in. Few thoughts:
[snip]
> and thanks for sheding some light on this. it's hard to guess if what the
> overall goal of a project is, judging from a few small notes.

I cannot stress too greatly that all of this is *hypothetical*.

TD Bank Financial Group is /not/ considering a move to Linux (of /any/
distribution).

There is /no project/ to migrate anything to Slackware Linux, or any other Linux
distribution. I simply want to be able to provide accurate information /if/ such
is ever asked of me.

(Sorry about the emphasis on the above statements; I need to make these points
clear to everyone that reads this thread)

- --
Lew Pitcher
IT Consultant, Enterprise Data Systems,
Enterprise Technology Solutions, TD Bank Financial Group

(Opinions expressed are my own, not my employers')
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Dominik L.. Borkowski <dom@vbi.vt.edu> wrote:
> Cichlidiot wrote:
>> Dominik L.. Borkowski <dom@vbi.vt.edu> wrote:
>>> uhmm, just because your cups server doesn't have a web browser, doesn't
>>> mean you can't use http://your-cups-server:631 from a client machine
>> It could be entirely possible that he only wants the server to have access
>> to the printer and thus has firewalled off port 631.

> And how exactly would the cups clients connect to the server? Hint: port
> 631.

Perhaps he does not want clients connecting. I know I don't. My machine is
the only one that needs access to its printer. And in a LAN situation, I
know of a certain paranoid sysadmin that has his system set up to dump
certain logs to printer just in case someone messes with the soft copy
logs (and yes, he was also aware they could disable the printer but
primarily was interested in catching the less talented sorts who wouldn't
think of that). Don't want any clients printing to that printer. So there
are many circumstances where one would NOT want clients connecting other
than localhost clients.

>>> out of curiosity, what are your circumstances?
>> What should this matter? He has outlined the restrictions of his
>> circumstances: no access to a web browser and no GUI (which I assume means
>> no KDE). This alone should be sufficient.

> Do you support any personnel with your IT skills? If so, you should know
> that one of the first things you have to ask a person with a problem is:
> what are you trying to accomplish. Often enough the problem is choosing a
> wrong approach to a given issue.

Yes, I have done tech support and while you do make a valid point, you
forget an equally valid one. Your solution may not be the appropriate one
and you are trying to force your solution upon someone who appears to have
a measure of technical competance. Enough so that we should at least have
some confidence in his ability to chose not to use a browser to configure
CUPS. In my experience, attempting to force your solution on one who has
expressed a desire for a different solution leads to nothing but ruffled
feathers and the real life equalivence of a flame fest. We should honor
the OP's request by giving the browser based solution only a mention
(particularly since he appears to be fully aware of the browser based
configuration) and then delving into the command line based solution. Even
if it would not be the solution you would use, it is a good educational
exercise. Remember, there are many ways to accomplish the same task, with
usually several solutions being perfectly valid. While it may not
dove-tail with your personal preferences, the OP has clearly stated he
wishes only to use the command line and CUPS provides plenty of options
down that avenue.

Now to the OP, another directory to look into if you want to see some of
the mysteries that is CUPS is /usr/share/cups where things like the
printer driver files are.

Cichlidiot wrote:

> Perhaps he does not want clients connecting. I know I don't. My machine is
> the only one that needs access to its printer. And in a LAN situation, I
> know of a certain paranoid sysadmin that has his system set up to dump
> certain logs to printer just in case someone messes with the soft copy
> logs (and yes, he was also aware they could disable the printer but
> primarily was interested in catching the less talented sorts who wouldn't
> think of that). Don't want any clients printing to that printer. So there
> are many circumstances where one would NOT want clients connecting other
> than localhost clients.

If you missed the point, I was referring to cups clients. By definition,
they are not clients if they were not intended to print.


>>>> out of curiosity, what are your circumstances?
> Yes, I have done tech support and while you do make a valid point, you
> forget an equally valid one. Your solution may not be the appropriate one
> and you are trying to force your solution upon someone who appears to have
> a measure of technical competance.

Nowhere I have even attempted to force the web browser solution. Please
quote me if I have. It's also easy to state an observation that somebody is
technically competent *after* all of the OP's postings. Take a note of when
I asked him about the circumstances plus suggested a web browser, and OP's
postings which go in greater technical depth. If you can read minds better
than anybody here, I'll take my hat off.

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Dominik,

Thank you for your suggestions. I appreciate the efforts you have gone through
to provide me with advice and guidance.

What you have told me about CUPS configuration makes sense; I just hope I can
piece everything together without breaking either the process or the tool.

Thanks again,

- --
Lew Pitcher
IT Consultant, Enterprise Data Systems,
Enterprise Technology Solutions, TD Bank Financial Group

(Opinions expressed are my own, not my employers')
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pgp trash troll delete

Hicks, Alan
188 Shady Dale Dr
Lizella, GA 31052
478-935-8132

+Alan Hicks+ <alan@lizella.network> wrote:
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> In alt.os.linux.slackware, Dominik L.. Borkowski dared to utter,
>> It's a life saver over what the printing situation was 5-10 years ago. Maybe
>> you don't remember the lpd/printcap hell, or managing printers between
>> different operating systems.
>
> This isn't 5-10 years ago. All printing systems in use today have
> matured.
>
>> I don't see big&fat lprng support section in the official samba howto. Am I
>> missing something?
>
> The presence of documentation for a mostly unrelated tool in another
> tool's documentation does not necessarily mean that the former is well
> supported in the latter. Indeed, the documentation's presence may well
> be caused by difficulty in supporting the former. By correlation, you
> cannot by this fact say one product is more supported than another in a
> third party application. samba was doing print sharing before there was
> CUPS and LPRng was pretty much you're only option. Things worked just
> as good then in that regaurd as they do now.
>
>> i see. so having one utility to print, another one to check printer status
>> is not enough?
>
> No, but having a GUI config tool to add printers, manage jobs, shut
> printers offline and crap like that does.
>
>> a printing sytem is too much? which exact things are done half-assed?
>
> Printers that just randomnly go offline and have to be turned back on.
> Jobs that get dropped into the bit bucket without warning. This may
> have improved since the last time I tried CUPS 1-2 years back.
>
>> Sure, except this allowes an admin to deploy such solution on hundreds of
>> workstations with one single entry in a netlogon script.
>
> That's a samba thing, not a CUPS thing. It's independent of the backend
> system that handles print jobs. I've done the same thing with hylafax
> to pipe postscript print documents from windows computers to a process
> that faxes that document out to a number it greps from the postscript
> file. All that should be needed for this is Samba and Ghostscript.
>
>>> Hmmm... why don't you put "lprng pdf creation" without the quotes into
>>> google and tell it you're feeling lucky? LPRng can do the same thing
>>> with minimal configuration.
>>
>> The irony. Go ahead and do it. The first link describes something without
>> ever using lprng.
>
> Nor does it use CUPS. To quote the article,
>
> the technique used to print to the PDF service can be used to print
> to any other printer service shared by Samba or Windows, so it is good
> information to cover.
>
> The article mentions using LPRng tools for setting up linux printing
> from a client.
>
>> If you haven't noticed yet, yes, I'm advocating cups. However, at least I
>> have the decency not to smear the other product [lprng].
>
> If you haven't noticed yet, yes, I'm advocating LPRng, and you have
> been smearing LPRng.
>
> It's a life saver over what the printing situation was 5-10 years ago.
>
> By implication you are calling LPRng antiquated and not as capable of
> handling the job of printing as CUPS. Now we can debate about this all
> we want for as long as we want, but the fact is, LPRng works, it
> doesn't crash, support for it is for now more readily available, and
> it's code base is more mature. In comparison, CUPS has crashed on me
> many times (just up and died with no helpful data written to syslog)
> and buggy (randomly stops spooling jobs to the printer).
>
> That's just ME. As always, YMMV.
>
> - --
> It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise,
> Than for a man to hear the song of fools.
> Ecclesiastes 7:5
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