Groups of printers?

[John A. Murdie]

CUPS, of course, implements classes (fail-over or load-balancing collections) of printers, but I wonder how many users and administrators would find printer 'groups' useful - at the /printers web page and in the configuration and in the logs? Of course, one can search at that web page for the printer one wishes to see, and one could even use the group names as a printer name prefix to restrict the view by search, and have access controls to restrict access. I think that to have explicit group access policies would be useful, however. Printer classes are not groups; when one queues a document to a class, one can't specify which on which printer of the class the document is printed.

Display separation has been achieved at my site by using two instances of the CUPS scheduler on our print server, and some port mapping and iptables configuration. Alas, it was necessary to make two separate installations of CUPS rather than starting two instances of cupsd from the same build with the '-c group1/cupsd.conf' and '-c group2/cupsd.conf' options, respectively, to point to separate cupsd.conf files the first of which contained:

ServerRoot /cups/group1/etc/cups
ErrorLog /cups/group1/log/cups/error_log
AccessLog /cups/group1/log/cups/access_log
PageLog /cups/group1/log/page_log
CacheDir /cups/group1/cache/cups
TempDir /cups/group/spool/cups/tmp

as there are no LogDir, RunDir or SpoolDir directives, at least. (For LogDir, a CUPS_LOGDIR environment variable whose value was passed to the backend would be useful for specialist backends which require to log the details of their operation.)

John A. Murdie