New printers not in hplip drivers of Centos 5

[Paul Conklin]

I guess the first and foremost question would be, what format is the print job coming in to you as?  Do you use any part of the PPD like Tray selection?  Most of our queues we just use RAW and use CUPS to direct traffic as the app usually already makes PostScript in our instance.


> Hello all,
> I am looking for advice on how to proceed with adding new printers to CUPs that are not supported by the current configuration.
>
> My company has over 2000 printers across the US that are printed to through a specialized app running within our intranet (on a VPN).  We have several cups servers to handle the load with a load balancer in front of them to distribute jobs evenly.  It's my job to maintain these servers, and manage any new printers that the company decides to add.
>
> We recently opened a store in the UK now as well, and this is where my problem begins.
> We are attempting to service the UK stores with the same CUPS servers, however the printers they are using are new MFP's (HP LaserJet M1536dnf, and a HP LaserJet 400 color M451dn).  Up until now, black and white printing has not been an issue, but now they want to implement color printing as well.  Our CUPs servers are running Centos 5.7 standard install, Cups 1.3.7, and it looks like HPLIP v 1.6.7.
>
> We have never used HPLIP in setting up cups queues before, always using a URI pointing to port 9100, and since color printing was never an issue, most of the PPD's used are generic post script.
>
> So now I am faced with getting these new printers to print reliably and in color.  The generic postscript drivers seemed to work for basic printing, but I was told there were intermittent problems where cups wouldn't print to the UK printers at all.
>
> I would like to now it's best to approach this as my understanding of printing color through cups requires the hplip software to be setup correctly, and these printers require a newer version than what is on our current production servers.
>
> It would seem I have to uninstall HPLIP and hand install the latest version.  In doing this, would there be any benefit in also attempting to upgrade CUPS as well?
>
> Any advice anyone can offer would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thank you,
> Scott
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