[cups.general] Cups experience and feedback

[Paul Ortman]

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Romain Jacquet wrote:
> Hello everybody,
> 
> We want to use differents network printers with differents features
> (multiple trays, staple,...). We find Cups is very simple to use with
> its integrated support of ppdfile.
> 
> But our sysadmins don't want to use Cups. They think that it is not
> reliable (especially the spooler) and bugs are difficult to fix. I'm not
> sure that this is the truth...
> 
> Is somebody have experience of administration with a lot of printers?
> What is  the frequence of the problems?
> (We plan to use a Cups server with up to 30 printers and some of this
> printer can print up 3000 pages per day.)

- From my experience CUPS has proven fairly reliable.  I'm running it in a
fairly complex environment, albeit not extremely high volume -- MacOSX,
Linux and mostly WindowsXP clients, ~75 printers/queues most of which
are HP Laserjets, max of ~2000 pages/day on some of the printers.

We're using Samba to share the printers (all using Adobe PS drivers)
with the XP clients and native CUPS for the Linux and OSX clients.  The
biggest problem I've had is that certain jobs from OSX clients get sent
as PDFs to the print server who then has a problem converting that to PS
for the printers -- these are generally few and far between, but
frustrating to debug.  I've also had problems where the PS sent to the
printer causes the printer to abort the job.  However, from my limited
experience, no printing solution is perfect and there are problems with
all of them.  I personally like the flexibility of the solution (we
added in Pykota for print accounting) and responsiveness of the
developers/power users to my problems (Mathew Sweet and Helge Blischke
definitely deserve my thanks).  However, YMMV.  Good luck.

- --
Paul Ortman

PGP Key: 55602C81
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