[cups.general] hidden config file for printconf

Kurt Pfeifle kpfeifle at danka.de
Sat Jun 10 09:17:41 PDT 2006


<pierre.frenkiel at apc.univ-paris7.fr> wrote (Thursday 08 June 2006 11:37):

> I recently installed cups instead of LPRng under Fedora. Naïvely,
> I thought that all information was stored in /etc/cups, and that I'll
> be able to distribute the config on all computers of the site, as
> this was done with /etc/printcap of lpd.

Heh... that's similar to me, when I thought a move from 
sendmail to qmail would be easily done by installing qmail
once, and copy a config file to 20 other boxen...

Two great fools we are, aren't we?  ;-P

> I discovered that this is not true, and that a lot of parameters are
> stored elsewhere. The problem is that I was unable to find
> where...

I learned that there absolutely is no other way to master any
piece of software's features, configuration and administration
unless I'm prepared to read a bit about it on its own website 
and also the  documentation it ships along its packages.

I usually start, by looking at the output of

  rpm -qip /path/to/not-yet-installed package

and 

  rpm -qlp /path/to/not-yet-installed package

and 

  rpm -qlp /path/to/not-yet-installed package | grep man

to find which man pages it ships, and sometimes

  rpm -qlp /path/to/not-yet-installed package | grep conf

to find out its config files

> This is not a problem as long as you have a single computer, but it is
> one if you want to distribure the same config to 100 machines.
> Of course, one can run -Xexport to save the config on a known file,
> but that means that you will have to run -Ximport at each reboot.
> It would be easier to know where this damned default config file is
> hidden!

CUPS has all config files in [install-dir]/etc/cups/* for sure.
If you want to replicate configurations, don't forget to replicate
the contents of etc/cups/ppd/* (which holds the driver description
files); if your RPMs aren't for the same system/version, you'd 
also have to check if ESP Ghostscript is present everywhere, and 
if the CUPS filters and backends are the same in the subdirs of
/usr/lib/cups/{filter,backend}

 --->  However, are you sure you do *at all* want to copy
 --->  the configs to every machine?

If you were familiar with CUPS, you'd know you can setup one
single CUPS print server, and all your clients do pick up all
the printers automagically, including the device-specific job
options contained in the driver description files.... (if you
enable a certain client configuration setting -- some distros,
like Ubuntu however prefer to cripple most of the builtin CUPS 
capabilities that make it a more convenient thing to use; in 
my eyes this is a crime against "usability"...)

> cheers,

Cheers,
Kurt




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