Pausing printers from Windows, using IPP [long]

[Helge Blischke]

Check out what you can do using the web interface. It can be used
from almost any browser, and access to things like stopping/starting
a printer, deleting jobs etc. may be individually configured.

Helge



Manuel Capinha wrote:
> 
> Hi all!
> 
> Short question: Is there a way to stop/start a printer in CUPS, from Windows ?
> 
> Long version:
> My setup:
> One box running SuSE 9.1 with CUPS 1.20 installed.
> 4 Windows XP boxes, used by our computer lab operators.
> ~90 Windows 2000 boxes used by the students.
> 1 HP Color Laserjet 5500 dtn (Sucessfully installed in CUPS and working from windows and linux).
> Windows connects to CUPS using IPP.
> 
> I'm trying to replace our windows printer servers in a lab at my college. Due to the "way things are" here, we use a human operator to control which jobs get printted. This means that a printer must be paused at all times, except when a fellow student aproaches the counter and asks the lab monitor to release his prints.
> 
> Now, I've succesfully setup CUPS, working over IPP to our Windows boxes, in a way that a part of our network is allowed to send print jobs and another part has to autenticate themselves in order to access the printer.
> The reason for the segregation is that I want our lab monitors to be able to cancel any job and I don't want the students to be able to cancel each others job (so far, I haven't been able to find a way to restrict the cancel operation to the owner of the job.. is it even possible ?)
> 
> Now, what I'm lacking is the pause/restart functionality. I've debbuged, watched the logs, read the IPP RFCs and the CUPS source. So far, I've gathered this:
> - RFC says that a user must be authenticated as administrator or operator to pause/start a printer.
> - RFC says that this authentication process is left to the implementation.
> - Windows tries to pause/start the printer using /printer/<printername>.
> - CUPS doesn't like Windows pausing through /printer/ and denies it, saying that this must be done through /admin/.
> 
> For what I gather, Windows is partially at fault here, because it doesn't try to authenticate as operator or administrator. But, the question is, Is it possible to pause printers from Windows, using IPP (or some other transport, for the matter) ?

-- 
H.Blischke at srz-berlin.de
H.Blischke at srz-berlin.com
H.Blischke at acm.org