[cups.general] Two schools sharing network and printservers. How to choose which printers appears where.

Erling Ringen Elvsrud systemansvarlig at vagaungdomsskule.no
Wed Feb 15 02:37:56 PST 2006


Hello,


I'm a system administrator responsible of many sites in a small
community including two schools just 50 meters apart.

Currently the situation is like this (luckily I just started so the
undesirable configuration is not my fault):

- Pupils and teachers are connected to the same network (wireless bridge
between schools). 
- more than 100 computers
- 13 printers totally
- about 40 teachers and 350 pupils.
- Both schools and both user groups share a single IP-range
(192.168.1.0/24).
- No centralized file sharing / printing / user accounts implemented.
- Most hosts run Linux (ubuntu) and a few windows (XP/98).
- Hosts print directly to network printers (with Cups).


What I plan to do with respect to printing is:

- Implement CUPS printer server(s) so that I can avoid all the local
printing queues on every host that occasionally stalls. I want to manage
a few queues and be able to delete stucked printer jobs, etc.
- When a user wants to print, only printers in the school where the user
is located should should show up.
- I have available at least 1 server for pupils (file / print / user
auth ). and 1 server for teachers. I want to share 1 teacher server
between school A and school B, and one pupil server between school A and
school B.

My question is:

- How can I implement a CUPS solution where 1 CUPS server is shared
among teachers in school A and school B, but teachers in school A sees
only printers in school A and vice versa. I have tested CUPS in my
office adding all network printers in the building and using ServerName
in /etc/cups/client.conf on my workstation. It works well. Is it
possible to choose which printers show up on a client based on the
clients IP-address? one alternative solution is to run several cups
instances on one server with multiple IP-addresses on its network
interface. With such a solution I can just use a different
IP-address /hostname in the ServerName option in client.conf depending
on where the client is located. 

Best regards,

Erling Ringen Elvsrud





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