[cups] filtering available printers, group separation and multiple cups instances on one server

[Michael Sweet]

Spike,

> On Apr 27, 2017, at 2:43 PM, Spike <spike at drba.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> as we've grown and added printers to serve different offices we've ended up
> with several complaints related to printouts ending up to the wrong
> printer. This is understandable as a user may be trying to adjust something
> in the printer dialogue and by accident select the wrong printer.
> 
> We've looked for options, but there doesn't seem to be any way in cups to
> filter the list of printers returned by a server, sort of applying an ACL.
> 
> In lieu of that, we created an additional cups server and pointed each
> client to the right one. This worked for a while, but we would soon need to
> add a new one and I can see a trend that I don't like... especially since
> load wise this isn't warranted, we don't need more machines, we just need
> to filter the printers.
> 
> Have I missed it and this is possible somehow?

Unfortunately, while CUPS and the CUPS API provide ways to filter the list of printers, I am not aware of any GUI that actually makes use of the functionality...

> if not, how can we run
> multiple cups server? we run Ubuntu xenial with systemd.

You can run cupsd directly, providing different -c and -s values to point at the corresponding config files.

_________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer