a question about cups and windows

[John A. Murdie]

>
> For first, in advance, I'm really newbye about cups !
>
> Now the question...   I've setup <in some way...> a cups server on my Opensuse 11.0, and I really appreciate how from ubuntu client simply editing client.conf u can share in so easy style the printers of my cups server...
>
> Unluckly, as many others, I live in a "mix" enviroment... so I would like know if is there some straight way <something like as above> to share to windows workstation the printers of my server cups, without installing everytime the windows driver for every printer... ?!?
>
> So I really appreciate any advice you can give me..
>
> thx in advance
> Alessio

Another way, simpler but perhaps not so polished, is to arrange that the cups-lpd executable (found in the CUPS installation under $CUPS/lib/cups/daemon/cups-lpd) is executed for every print job received on port 515 of your CUPS print server. You'll need the line:

printer stream tcp nowait lp $CUPS/lib/cups/daemon/cups-lpd cups-lpd -o document-format=application/vnd.cups-raw

somewhere in /etc/inetd.conf - don't forget to expand '$CUPS' to the root of the CUPS installation directory. The 'raw' business is there because we don't want CUPS to re-process a print file that Windows has produced.

Then create as many 'UNIX LPR' printer queues on your Windows print server as you require - with the same printer queue names - and publish them to your Windows PC clients. (If you haven't a Windows server, simply set the queues up on the Windows PC(s) by hand.)

I'm told that it is not possible to publish IPP queues created on Windows Server (2003) to (Windows) clients - if so, it would not be necessary to use the Berkeley LPR queues here, nor cups-lpd. (If anyone knows something to the contrary, or why this is not possible, I'd like to hear about it - I am not a Windows expert or even an administrator!)

John A. Murdie