Remote CUPS with multiple users

[Ian Darwin]

One site has a half-dozen workstations shared by ~40 users, passwords via NIS
from the server, something like

WS1..n (192.168.1.30+n) ----------- Server 192.168.1.1 -------- Printer 10.1.1.1

They need authentication because they bill users for pages printed, using
something I wrote similar to accsnmp but with hooks to our own billing
database on the server.

On the client side, we have "ipp" URLs like ipp://192.168.1.1/printers/hp

On the server side we have the actual physical URL: socket://...:9100

Each workstation will serve multiple users in a day, so putting their passwords into /etc/cups is not a go.

Passwords are on the server in NIS, so putting them in a file on each workstation would be out of sync with changes.

Putting "AuthInfoRequired username,password" in the printers.conf on the server causes jobs to need auth.

Putting this on the client side causes Firefox to (usually) prompt for a password, but the workstation then doesn't communicate with the server.

Am I right in assuming that both sides should have this AuthInfoRequired in a scenario like this?

FWIW, the server is running CUPS 1.3.11 (OpenBSD 4.7) and we've tested with
various clients running 1.3 and 1.4 (the actual workstations are Ubuntu 8.10 but one got upgraded to 9.10, not fully tested this one yet).

Thanks to anyone that can help on this. All the tutorials I've looked in only talk about disabling auth or hard-coding a single user's credentials. Unix was born as a shared-user system so this ought to be supported, or supportable. Thanks.