[cups.general] Documentation clarification for CUPS newbie

[Ambrose Li]

On 04/08/06, Michael Sweet <mike at easysw.com> wrote:
> Interesting, since we regularly print via IPP from our Win2k boxes...
> Perhaps you have a firewall that is preventing the outgoing requests
> on port 631?

I'll double-check when I get back to the office on Monday.

> While the documentation is certainly now out of date, this statement
> is not incorrect.
>
> The issue with IPP printing on Windows is that you (currently) have
> to associate the printer driver manually (or via a helper app) on
> the client.  Windows provides some mechanism for driver download
> via IIS, but we're still trying to crack that undocumented protocol...
>
> With Samba, however, you can register drivers on your print server
> and then have them automatically downloaded by the clients the first
> time they ask to use the printer, either through the Network Places/
> Neighborhood icon or the Add Printer wizard.

While from a feature point of view this certainly should be important,
in practice I have not found automatic driver installation to be of any
real use. There are a couple of reasons:

1. Some manufacturers (e.g, HP) package extra stuff with their drivers
    (e.g., lots of fonts), which will only get installed if you run
    their installer. Because the extra stuff sometimes really is useful,
    we always run the manufacturer's installer just in case.

2. Different versions of Windows don't just require different drivers;
    they sometimes call the printer by different names. For the purpose
    of automatic driver installation, if you make Samba export a name
    that is useful for Windows 9x, the name might not work for Win2000
    clients. In a mixed network with all kinds of Windows versions,
    automatic driver installation may not work for all clients even if you
    can figure out what files you need.

Once I figure out what extra stuff are packaged and how I can install
them without installing from the installer, *and* when the network get
to a point where it's reasonably homogeneous, then automatic
driver installation becomes useful.

Or perhaps I am just unlucky, or maybe I have been doing something
very obviously wrong (which very probably might be true).
-- 
cheers,
-ambrose