Authenticated Printing (Linux on Linux) usingCUPS and IPP

[Michael Lackner]

It seems, that while CUPS itself supports a lot of authentication options, the client side of it has some problems.

So, update: I found out, that submitting the credentials within the IPP:// line did not work at all. I didn't get that at the beginning, and I'll explain why.

A lot of our Users have different Usernames on their Laptops/Desktops and on our 19" computation "servers". The servers all auth against said LDAP, the printserver too. The Desktops and Laptops don't.

But on MY machine I have the same username that I also use on the LDAP-/Printserver. Let's just say, that username is "myuser", and the PWD is "mypwd".

So, when trying this URI: IPP://myuser:mypwd@<printhost>:<printerport>/<printqueue>
..it did auth on the shell only. However, when trying to specify a different user (that didn't exist as a system user on my client machine), it still wanted to auth "myuser", no matter, what i specified on that IPP:// line.

So, CUPS as client seems to use the system Username of the user who wants to print, not the username specified in the IPP:// URI.

So, another question arises: How am I supposed to pass credentials to the CUPS/IPP server AT ALL when printing? I mean, it works on the CUPS webinterface because of the Auth Dialog, but where can i even specify any credentials for the printing itself, if not in the IPP:// URI?

Either I'm a really incapable Google user, or that information just doesn't exist anywhere.. ;)

I also searched the CUPS documentation, but didn't find anything. It only says, what auth methods are supported, but not how they are configured exactly.

Even if the dialog popup won't work, it would be good, if I could at least specify the plaintext (or ideally: hashed, for Digest Auth) credentials in printers.conf on the client side, just as it's being done for SMB:// too.

Any ideas for that client-side problem?