On Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:20:48 +1030, Tim wrote:
On Mon, 2008-11-03 at 22:06 +0000, Beartooth wrote:
[...]
> Machines #2, #3, and #4 all show my wife's printer
> downstairs, as well as another. (Machine #1 does not.) #2 and #4 have
> the other, set to default, as the real machine on #1 -- though for a
> while they kept insisting it did not exist. Machine #3 has the "other"
> printer shown with a URI saying "file: /dev/null" -- and won't let me
> remove it!
You might want to tell us specifically what you did to achieve all this,
rather than just the results. Very little fiddling should be needed
from a fresh start, but some amount of fiddling might be needed to undo
a pre-mangled system.
I can't tell you, alas!,for two reasons. I would have, if I could
remember. But I didn't keep good track; and, you might know, I did a
whole series of things on one machine -- and then realized I had somehow
gotten off #3 and onto #2 ...
On a fresh system, all you should have to do is connect a printer to
the
print server computer, and let it sort itself out, or manually set that
printer up on the server. Or a bit of both (I renamed the automatic
named printer settings to something less annoying). Whichever way you
go, once the server can print to its own printer, it's working, and
you'd then configure the server to let the rest of the LAN make use of
it. That's a two-parter, allowing CUPS through the firewall (*), and
configuring CUPS administration options related to sharing (**),
I'm thinking a fresh start is indeed indicated, yet again -- or
at least a nearly fresh one.
Let me see if I have this straight. Having done most of the two
footnoted parts above (maybe all -- I tried to), I *think* I can just go
from client to client, deleting *all* printers (if all will let me; last
time I tried that, as I said above, there was one that seemed immortal,
afaict).
If/when I get thepresent entries deleted, they will presumably
once again find my wife's printer downstairs. They did last time,
doubly : once as a printer and once as a fax. Does it hurt to have that
there? Should I re-delete it, or maybe go shut her machine down (she's
out of town) before I start telling clients to find printers?
* On my LAN, all the PCs are trusted explicitly, so I took the easy
option of setting the firewall to trust eth0 as a whole, rather than
particular ports. There's another barrier between the LAN and the
internet. Firewall on each PC get in the way of print serving, and also
some print clients. As I recall, it got in the way of automatically
discovering the print server on the LAN. The print server can
periodically announce its presence, but the firewall stopped that.
I did that, iiuc : marked both eth0 and ippp+ as trusted on all
clients and on the server.
** Share out that printer to the LAN but it doesn't need sharing
to the
internet, unless you have a mixture of different isolated subnets, where
that option will allow crossing from one subnet to another.
I don't have such complications -- it's all on plain LAN, without
subnets. But I don't follow how I share it only to the LAN -- unless
that's what trusting eth0 and ippp+ do, perhaps??
Perhaps you might want to allow remote administration of the
server,and
allow users
to cancel any jobs, but that's icing on the cake, it's not needed just
to be able to print.
OK.
You may also want the server to include printers
on other CUPS servers, if you had other ones on the premises. But,
again, that's not needed. And can get messy if you have several servers
publishing their own printers, plus republishing the other server's
printers.
That's the one thought that gives me pause about my wife's
printer. We don't normally fax things, nor receive faxes; but I can
easily imagine it becoming convenient to be able to print to one
another's printers, for instance if one breaks down or runs out of ink/
toner/whatever. Otoh, it sounds like a large can of worms ...
On the clients, you shouldn't need to do anything. They should
automatically find out about all the printers available on the LAN, and
automatically list them as printable to. This should take a few
moments, not ages. All you should have to do, if you had more than one
choice, would be to pick a default.
I haven't (yet, at least) done a thing about my wife's machine
nor printer -- not made it either a client or a server.
Having said that, if you're reconfiguring a system which already
had
printers configured all over the place on the clients, you'd want to
remove all those configurations, and then let them find the servers by
themselves, again.
Hmmm ... Does that mean I need to go reconfigure my wife's CUPS
in any case??
--
Beartooth Staffwright, PhD, Neo-Redneck Linux Convert
Remember I know precious little of what I am talking about.