[cups.general] CUPS Server Auto Install Driver for IPP Printers on Clients?

[Michael Sweet]

On Nov 18, 2011, at 11:07 AM, Brian Kroth wrote:
> I'm wondering if it's possible (or could be made possible) to allow some form of auto-install of printer drivers (even if it's just to help select an existing driver on the system) when using an IPP style URI on clients?
> 
> I know this is already possible if one uses SMB, but that's less desirable, and only works with Windows.
> 
> In some searching it seems there's a "printer-driver-installer" attribute defined in the RFC, but CUPS doesn't allow one to make use of it.

Right, that was never a great solution, since there was no mechanism to get the specific driver for a given client OS so it just had to point to a web page offering a download...

> The "printer-make-and-model" attribute is defined, but clients don't seem to make use of it (not much you can do there, unless the client is also CUPS, though if that were the case perhaps something intelligent could be done with the CUPS-Get-PPDs call or some such).

Right.

> To elaborate a bit more, I'm thinking of Windows and OS X clients connecting to a central Linux CUPS (1.4.4 from Debian Squeeze) server for accounting and other custom programming tidbits.

Windows has never implemented anything more than the barest IPP/1.0 support (IPP/1.0 never made it past experimental status in the IETF). There are some free "add printer" type of applications for Windows floating around that will use the Windows PS driver with the CUPS PPD (much like we do for SMB driver downloads), but that requires you use an app on the Windows PC.

If you have Avahi installed and configured on your Debian system (so that cupsd advertises shared printers via Bonjour), OS X clients will be able to use those printers as-is.

> In the Windows print server/client world I've seen things that (if they client browser is IE) allow the user to simply click a link and using some ActiveX or whatever it will just handle the install/setup for them.  Even without that, if you go through the normal Windows dialogs and give it one of the https://windows-printserver/printers/foo/.printer style links, it will again figure out the right driver and just do it.

Right, Microsoft has their own undocumented IPP operation for relaying the driver stuff over SMB. We obviously can't support that with CUPS... :(

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Michael Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer, PWG Chair