Remote Printing from a Thin Client

[Kurt Pfeifle]

Stefan Pfetzing <stefan.pfetzing at secunet.com> wrote 
(Monday 28 August 2006 17:12):

> Hi Folks,
> 
> I'm wondering which way would be the best to solve the following
> scenario: 
> 
> - a thin client to which a printer is connected
> - an application server, on which a user loggs in (via remote X11
>   or similar) 
> 
> Only the user logged in through the thin client should be able to
> print on that printer, and all prints by that user should only be 
> printed to that printer. 
> 
> My current guess is, I should write a script as a "backend" which 
> then prints to the printer connected at the thin client, but maybe 
> there is a better / easier solution. 
> 
> I've already searched google, but didn't find very much.


The "best" way which would serve your scenario depends on a *lot* 
more specific information than what you gave. As you may be well
aware, there is not just one kind of setups that are dubbed "thin
clients"....

Just *how* "thin" are these? Do they have a harddisk with room for 
temporary spooling? Do they have a full OS installed? Which one? Or 
do they just draw a kernel via BootP and an X server to locally 
display their remotely running applications? How far away are the
thin clients from their server? LAN or WAN? How many thin clients
are attached to one server and "active" concurrently? What do you 
mean by "X11 'or similar'"? What kind of applications are exactly 
running on the remote server? Do they use a full desktop environment
like KDE? Or do they run Gnome? (See, the difference with Gnome or
KDE alone will yield a very different proposal for the "best" setup
for you...) Can your thin clients run a full local CUPS installation, 
with all filters? Is your printer capable to process PostScript?
What other security requirements are to be met beyond what you 
mentioned?

To honestly evaluate your scenario and really come up with a close
to "best" solution requires a lot of detailled info about the given
environment, the customer requirements, the user expectations, as
well as a profound knowledge about printing, thin client computing,
application server computing, CUPS and security.... and the answer
is "worth" more than one or two man days of professional consultancy
work, because that's what it takes to discuss/understand all aspects.

Cheers,
Kurt