[cups.general] Restricting browsable printers

[John Morton]

I'm looking at using the cups printer browsing/directory service system
to enable various branches of my organisation (on different subnets) to
print to each other's invoice printers. I expect the topology to look a
little like this:

 - Each branch LAN will have client machines with printers and
 a server with printers, and every cups server will know about
 the local printers via broadcast on a 30 second interval. The
 main server's cups instance will also relay any printer information
 it recieves from the WAN.

 - A central cups server will poll each of the branch servers for
 information about their local printers, and will relay this
 information to all the other branches.

The problem with this model is that 100 branches with an average of four
printers each will result in the central cups server sending
out a half meg of browse data to each of a hundread servers, each over
256k pipes. Even if it polled and relayed once a night, it would still
add up to a lot of traffic.

I'd like to be able to configure each of the branch servers to only
expose one printer to the central polling server, however it looks as
though the browsing code is uninterested in using access control to
printers as a means of deciding if some other server should see a given
printer at all.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
John Morton