Authentication to a printer over IPP

[Jamie McLaughlin]

Hi,

I'm trying to print over a University network to a Sharp MX-3501N using IPP. I'm running CUPS under Gentoo linux 2006.1.

I can print without problems using another printer on the same network, a HP Laserjet 8150, also via IPP.

The problem is that the Sharp MX-3501N requires a user name and password to be sent to it in order to print. At the moment, sending a job to it causes simply nothing to happen. The job looks like it has completed, and /var/log/cups/error_log even says "Print file accepted" and reports no errors. But the printer has just ignored it.

On Windows, we were forced to use Novell's IPrint to connect to all printers, and the Windows driver dialog box had a tiny section for a user name and password. I've searched without success for how to emulate this behavior in CUPS, or even which protocol is being used for the authentication.

By the way, the "Port" for the printer in Windows was reported as "ipp://shefuniprt/ipp/hri-mx3501-gen", which I guess is the IPrint server. Setting this as the DeviceURI in CUPS produces exactly the same results as printing direct to the IP of the printer: No errors but no output. I think that everything bar the authentication is working, because "ipp://shefuniprt/ipp/foobar" produces an error as one would expect.

Could anyone suggest what I might try in order to submit my user name and password to the printer correctly? Thanks loads and sorry if I've missed something obvious.