[cups] CUPS and High Availability

[Alex Korobkin]

On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 8:52 AM, Joseph Fisher <jxfish2 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Of course, to be a truly HA solution, you would need to put a load balancer
> in front of all CUPS servers, so that incoming print requests would print
> from the next available server.
>

I have exactly this setup with a dozen of CUPS servers behind HAproxy. It
is OK for basic needs: fire a job and hope that it prints immediately.
However, if your job is stuck or if some app wants to check on the status
of the job, it's impossible to do so because the proxy returns different
backend's status each time, and the job is not there.

Rsyncing configs is easy if you can afford stopping your backend instances
for that. Just stop cups, rsync printers.conf and etc/cups/ppd, start cups.
Otherwise use lpadmin command for some creative configuration on the fly.

I tried to setup cups-browsed in the past but it just crashed for me,
therefore I don't know how it works in HA mode.

Would love to hear anyone else's experience with CUPS in high availability
mode.
-- 
-Alex