Printing to CUPS 1.3 from Windows Server 2003

John A. Murdie john at cs.york.ac.uk
Tue Aug 21 04:19:51 PDT 2007


For some time at my site, we've successfully had one group of (hundreds of) Windows XP PC clients printing directly to a CUPS 1.2.* server. Since this group of PCs share a single disc image and are expected to be able to print to a very small fixed number of printers which rarely change, we arranged that the client's common disc image configures IPP printers served by the Solaris CUPS print server. The image is not renewed for many months at a time. This arrangement works well in this situation, but it is not flexible enough for the general case; adding or changing a printer means re-creating the common PC client image (one wouldn't want to reconfigure the printers manually on hundreds of PCs).

We have another large group of Windows XP PC clients which are expected to have many more printers, but a set which can change quite frequently - new printers arrive, old ones are removed etc. These XP clients have not yet been moved to target a CUPS printing system on their Solaris CUPS print server - which is used by many Linux CUPS clients, but instead make use of their Windows Server 2003 -published printers which target a Berkeley LPR -derived print system. I'm a Unix/Linux specialist, not a Windows administrator, but those here tell me that they can do this because Windows Server 2003 allows them to publish Berkeley LPR printers (to the XP clients) but not IPP ones! The requirement to be able to add and to change printers does not allow the solution of the system of my first paragraph. Thus, as I found out by reading around and posting questions to this forum here in March this year, one solution is to install Samba on the Solaris print server to 'fool' the Windows Server 2003 system that it is targetting a Windows print server - whose SMB printers are publishable to its clients. Alas, I find this solution most unpleasant to think about, and regard a Samba server as an otherwise unneeded wart on the print server. I thought that IPP was supposed to be a universal print protocol, and its implementations complete in themselves.

Is there no other way for a Windows Server 2003 to print to a CUPS server so that the printers are publishable (by the normal Windows mechanism) to the Windows XP clients? We'd really like to use IPP everywhere, and leave Berkeley LPR to history. Is there any 'how to' documentation available discussing this whole area?

Has the introduction of CUPS 1.3 (with Kerberos, LDAP etc) altered the situation with respect to printing from a Windows Server to CUPS at all?

John A. Murdie




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