[cups.general] CUPS & LDAP

[MJ]

Mike Sweet wrote:
>
> As for storing configuration information using LDAP, that idea has
> been suggested before, but at present we have no plans of doing so.
> It is possible that the revision control hooks that will be in CUPS
> 1.2 could be used for this purpose (update the config files via HTTP
> and then cupsd runs an external command to commit the change to a
> repository of some sort - it could be a command that puts the config
> stuff in LDAP)

I also would like to see cupsd support LDAP.

Some organizations have thousands of printers spread across the globe, and  they store them in an LDAP directory. To make use of this, people write homegrown tools to query LDAP and generate a static lpd.conf or cupsd.conf file. This is obviously a very high maintenance way of doing things, as the information is quickly outdated.

The ideal architecture would be:

 - cups can be configured --with-ldap
 - cupsd uses a cups/cups-ldap.conf file
 - cupsd queries it's printer configuration from LDAP at startup
 - cupsd uses persistent LDAP search to keep the printer config updated
 - cups HTTP interface is templated to understand the organizations LDAP printer object class(es) and able to write new printers to LDAP

--
mj