Not sure if there's any interest...

[Jack]

Okay, so I'm the general printer admin for a regional hospital here in Montana.  Now, we have about 4000 users and some 500 - 600 printers of various builds, designs, and uses.  There's a majority of HPs, several Sharps, mostly lasers, some thermal label printers, etc.  You get the idea, not homogenous at all.

So the problem I've had to deal with is how to make everything IPP from the Windows point of view and covering WinXP, Win2k3, Win7, and Win2k8.  And we have to do this in such a way as to make sure that our tech staff and end users are only marginally impacted or not at all.

So, I've almost solved this:

Two Windows printservers:
kal-print   ( for the non-HP printers )
kal-printhp ( only for HP printers )

these two are windows 2k3 servers. This would work fine with Samba, and I'd originally built it like that.  There were driver problems, and I thought it was the fault of freebsd/samba build I had, but it turned out to be just driver problems - as the exist exactly the same on the windows servers... so you cna just use Samba if you like for driver loading.

there are (now) 3 CUPS servers.  Two to the printing, and a third handles classes.

There's a scheduled task on the windows servers which extracts name, port info, driver version/type, etc and loads it to a database via a web interface using JSON.

There are scripts on each of the CUPS servers to build them up to match the windows servers as well as possible and to be identical to each other.  The one that handles classes will get a script to build classes as well.

And finally there's a script which loads these printers to the XP and/or Win2k3 stations as IPP printers.  I've not yet solved this for 7/8 or Win2k8.

So what I have is a way that allows people/techs/endusers to load printers from \\kal-print[hp] and have a logon or GP script run and convert those USER printers to MACHINE printers whilst also making them IPP printers.  and now there's a way for the techs to login to just one server the Loadbalancer CUPs server and see who printed what from which IP.

I plan to eventually publish this to github or something.  Oh, right, I use git to keep all the Windows drivers in version control.  Also, I make sure that the x32 and x64 driver versions are installed. this way either flavor can work.

I know this is kind of a brain dump high level, and badly laid out, but... whatever.  If there's any interest in this work, please let me know, I'll try to get it out there when I have some time.