Are several servers needed?

[Kurt Pfeifle]

> Hi all,
>
> in our institute we have two groups (also buildings) of users and want
> to have one group of printers visible for one group and the others for
> the second one. We tried to use
>
> <Location /printers/name
> Order Deny,Allow
> Deny From All
> Allow From mysubnet
> </Location>
>
> or policies. But it doesn't work.
>
> On the client.notmysubnet we see the printer furthermore, but
> if we try to print
> printer hp4050 is idle.  enabled since Wed Jan 24 10:32:44 2007
>         Unable to get printer status (client-error-forbidden)!
>
>
> Now I read in the acticle SDB:Cups in a Nutshell (From openSUSE)
> that there is no solution for our problem:
>
>  " The following is not possible:
>  Sending of browings information about only some of the queues of
>  the server.
>  In a large company, it is not possible to have only one large server that
>  sends browsing information for some of the queues to the clients in one
>  department or one building and browsing information for other queues to
>  the other clients.
>  Several servers are needed for this."
>
> What is the best solution for our problem?
> We are not a large site and to run more servers are not our favourite
> solution.
>
> Thanx in advance for further help
>
> Waltraut


The only 2 options I can think of, and which surely work:

 * run 2 instances of CUPS on one server, which bind to different
   network interfaces (IP addresses); you'll need 2 network cards
   in that one server then; can use port 631 for both instances.

 * run 2 instances of CUPS on one server, which bind to different
   ports (same IP address); you only need 1 network card on that
   server then; but each CUPS instance needs to use a different
   port (and all the respective clients as well).

So if yours is not a "high security" requirement, but just one of user convenience and separation, these may be good enough.

I've never experimented with letting 2 CUPS daemons bind to 2 different virtual interfaces (you know, you can f.e. create an "eth0:1" interface on top of your "eth0", and assign different IP addresses to both?). I'm assuming Linux here....