Web page 'Jobs' page shows only one job

[Michael Sweet]

John A. Murdie wrote:
 > ...
> A possible solution would be for the desktop printing environment to
> send jobs for printing directly to the appropriate print server. (We
> have no desktop PCs with local CUPS printers.) The problem, however,
> is that we don't want to lose the very nice CUPS feature of printer
> autodiscovery - it'd be a great hassle to have to reconfigure all our
> desktop PCs (even if it were possible with one command) each time a
> printer was retired or added. Neither do we wish to have to name
> printers e.g. 'pp23 at printserver' - just e.g. 'pp23' is wanted. Is
> this solution configurable? Alternatively, is there some setting we
> can make for the CUPS schedulers on the servers to make them accept
> jobs from client CUPS schedulers immediately, regardless of how far
> the backend has got with the top 'Processing' job?

You understand the situation correctly, and this *is* a feature and
not a bug.  The primary motivation for this feature is that we don't
want to lose jobs, so we wait for each job to complete before sending
the next one to the queue.

If you have a single server for a particular group of users, you can
just add a client.conf file that points to that server, eliminating
the local queue.  If you use a name with multiple IPs, you can even
get a certain about of failover/load-balancing with the proper DNS
configuration.

Future versions of CUPS (e.g. CUPS 1.4 or 1.5) will support queuing
of multiple jobs simultaneously, such that you'll have N local jobs
that are active for a given remote queue, and each job will only
show up as completed when it has completed.

The tricky part of this is that we need to make this configurable
(not always desireable, as you can swamp a server) and handle the
load-balancing part of the equation differently - right now we wait
for a printer to go idle before submitting to a remote queue, so for
an implicit class with 2 printers we'd only be able to forward 2
jobs at a time.

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products           mike at easysw dot com
Internet Printing and Document Software          http://www.easysw.com