Broadcast only some printers

[Kurt Pfeifle]

Erik Potteiger <epotteiger at yahoo.com> wrote (Friday 28 July 2006 06:06):

> I have a network with 3 buildings.  Each building has it's own 
> subnet. 

If it is a "different subnet", are you using "BrowsePoll ..." on
each client, or are you using "BrowseRelay ..."?

> At the main building I have 1 Mac OS X server running  
> CUPS with the printers from all 3 buildings setup to be shared. 
> 
> How can I have only the printers in a building show up in the 
> printer list? 

It is not possible to selectively broadcast (or poll) groups of 
printers in CUPS 1.1.x. It is either "each one or none at all". 

In CUPS 1.2.x it is possible to share per printer. So you could
broadcast (or poll) only a group of printers. But again, it is 
the whole shared group is communicated to each client.

Clients can accept only a selection of all printers (the "Allow
>From ...." directive). But the selection is per CUPS server. It
is not possible for the clients to only show a group of all
printers a CUPS server shares.

In Linux/KDE one can set up a "printer selection filter". Users
can look at all printers their local cupsd offers to them, and
then decide to see only "this, this and that" (they could even
use regular expressions to narrow down the list of wanted ones).

> I do not want each building to show all the printers in the 
> list of printers.  Only the printers in the building should 
> show up on the list. I do not want to install a cups server 
> at each building.  Thank YOu.  

I currently can't think of a reliant way to implement this,
without any weird trickery using VPNs.

Cheers,
Kurt