Questions from another newbie

[Michael Sweet]

Jeremy Shoup wrote:
> ...
> We're currently using lprng and we have some "dummy" printers that just
> drop jobs to /dev/null that I don't want to have to transmit on the
> network if it can be helped.

With CUPS 1.2, you can control which printers are actually shared
("published" is the terminology that is used on the web interface)

 > ...
> Thus far when I bring down the print server and try to print
> a job I get an error back after about 30 seconds.  With lprng, which
> I am more used to, the jobs would queue until the print server comes
> back.  I should imagine that is also possible in cups, but I haven't
> figured out how yet.  Any suggestions?

If you are printing directly to a server, it should keep retrying
until the server is back up.  If you have two servers advertising
the queue, the client should automatically bounce to the other
server.

> One final question... I've got
> two servers and I'm running a high-availability tool to manage a
> virtual IP address between them (switches to the backup if the
> primary goes down).  Any suggestions on how I can keep the cups
> configurations in sync between them?

Most of our customers are using rsync or some similar mechanism which
periodically syncs the changes from the "master" server to the "slave"
servers via a cron job.

 > Unfortunately I really have a
> tendency to only manage the primary properly... Also, can I have a
> "Listen" line in cupsd.conf on the backup for the virtual IP even if
> it is not in possession of the virtual IP?

No, you can't do that, and that isn't how CUPS provide high-availability
printing...

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products           mike at easysw dot com
Internet Printing and Publishing Software        http://www.easysw.com