Authentication Problem on a Network Printer

Helge Blischke h.blischke at acm.org
Sat Apr 9 09:23:47 PDT 2011


KJ Lin wrote:

> Dear All,
> 
>    Our office has a network printer (Konica Minolta bizhub C250)
>    installed.
> It has an authentication setting that allows only print jobs with the
> username "Public" to work.
> 
>    All computers in our office use Windows XP and Vista, and the account
>    name
> for each computer is also set to "Public". So we can do the printing jobs
> very well.
> 
>    Now I install a new computer running Linux (CentOS 5.5). All printing
> configurations are done well. But when a print job is sent to the printer,
> it is deleted by the printer since the username is "PRINT", not the
> acceptable "Public". Even if I create and log in an account name "Public",
> the print job's username is still "PRINT".
> 
>    How can I configure CUPS to let print job's username to be "Public"?
> 
> Thanks
> 
> KJ

As to my experience, these printers require an encrypted authentication 
string which contains username and password (ir required).

What I have done in a similar situation was the following:
(1) I set up a fake printer on a Linux box and shared it via SAMBA to the 
Windows boxes. The PPD for this fake printer forced using a filter that 
dumped the PJL statements of the job to be printed to a file, converting the 
values of  "...KEY..." keywords to hex.
(2) I printed a test page with the appropriate GUI siettings for user name 
and password from a Windows box.
(3) I implemented a filter for the bizhub printers does the following:
a) extracts user name and password from the device_uri options string, if 
any
b) replaces the PJL statements by the appropriate statements for "restricted 
printing" if username and password (if requested) are provided, setting the 
key value to the appropriate hex string derived from executing the steps (1) 
and (2) (once for each username/password combo).

If you are interested, drop me an e-mail to 
h dot blischke at acm dot org
I'll then send you the pieces I did then (without any warranty, of course).

Helge





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