CUPS: end-user usability issues

[m.stonebank at surrey.ac.uk]

Michael Sweet wrote:

> With CUPS, each client has local queues which hold the job for that
> system; the local jobs are forwarded to a server for printing when
> that server is ready for them.  This method ensures that print files
> are not lost if a server goes down, and allows us to provide failsafe
> and load-balanced printing "for free".


Sorry, but this is a bogus philosophy.

In a business/educational/realworld environment, people don't want their print job sitting on their local box for x number of hours when the print server is down.  They want their printout NOW.  They want to see the state of the print server to see if its up, if it has a large queue.  That way if there is a problem, they can decide to print elsewhere.

The state it is now, you print and wait and wonder.


> One side-effect of this architecture is that users won't see the
> server queue state, however even if we changed lpq/lpstat to query
> the remote server you still wouldn't have a true queue status since
> the server queue will not show all of the jobs that are queued on
> other clients at the same time!


The idea of a print server is just that - IT is the print server.  Distributed print serving is no good if there is no way of checking the other clients in the distribution.

--
Michael Stonebank
Senior Computer Officer
University of Surrey
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