[cups.general] Howto print to a printer that needs authentication

[Michael R Sweet]

On Jun 12, 2009, at 2:34 AM, Johannes Meixner wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> On Jun 11 09:29 Michael R Sweet wrote (shortened):
>
>> Mark Veenstra wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I am rearly new to CUPS and went through some documentation.
>>> I want to print to a printer. Let's say the URL will be
>>> http://www.minihouse.eu/printers/IBM InfoPrint 1130 Vracht/.printer
>>> and the user credentials are:
>>> USER: MHNL\MARK_Printer
>>> PASS: testing123
>>
>> For this kind of configuration, include the user and password in the
>> device URI:
>>
>>
>> http://MHNL%5CMARK_Printer:testing123@www.minihouse.eu/printers/IBM%20InfoPrint%201130%20Vracht/.printer
>
>
> I would like to request to enhance the URI examples
> in the "Using Network Printers" documentation
> http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/doc-1.4/network.html
> regarding this by adding the following examples
> in the "Internet Printing Protocol (IPP)" section:
>
> ipp://username:password@ip-address-or-hostname/...
> http://username:password@ip-address-or-hostname/...
>
> Should I file an STR for this?

You can, but we really really don't want to encourage its use.  The  
normal CUPS install now handles this by holding the job for  
authentication and Tim's GNOME stuff allows the user to provide  
credentials after the fact. Once we know the remote end wants a  
username and password (auth-info-required=username,password), the  
client-side code (read: GNOME and KDE print APIs) can ask the user for  
credentials and/or pull them from the local password store/wallet/ 
keychain/whatever.

Let's not propagate the "one username and password for all users on a  
system" setup...

> By the way:
>
> According to the "Using Network Printers" documentation
> and according to backend/lpd.c in the CUPS 1.3.9 sources
> it seems for the lpd backend only a username but no
> password is possible.

Correct.

> I wonder why the lpd backend does not also support
> lpd://username:password@ip-address-or-hostname/

LPD does not support authentication.

> As far as I see the reason is that according to
> RFC 1179 "Line printer daemon protocol" there is
> no authentication at all in LPD - instead here the username
> is only used to describe who has requested the print job.

>
> Is this correct?

Yes.

____________________________________
Michael R Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer