CUPS Administrative Guide

In Detail

The Common UNIX Printing System (CUPS) is software that allows a computer to act as a print server, receiving print jobs from client computers, managing them, and sending them to the appropriate printer. It consists of a print spooler and scheduler, filters to convert print jobs to the format required by each printer, and a backend system to send the data to the chosen printer from client applications. Since every printer manufacturer does things differently, printing can be very complicated, and has always been a hard issue in the UNIX world for this reason. By providing a portable, modular printing layer, CUPS brings printing for UNIX into the modern age. It applies open standards for network printing through the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) and uses platform-independent drivers (Postscript Printer Definition, PPD) to print. Today, CUPS is the default printing system for a large number of Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.) and UNIX-based operating systems.

This book assumes that you have no knowledge of CUPS. It starts by telling you the story of how CUPS came to be and why there is such excitement about it. We then move on to installing, compiling, and managing your print network. Haven't you struggled to find the right directives for your printer? Enough of that search, this book will tell you where to find what. Not only that, but widely used directives and their uses are explained here along with directions to use them. There is more: you can learn how to manage the ever increasing print job load, set up your clients, and manage users. All this done, you will learn how to monitor, filter, and secure your CUPS server.

What you will learn from this book?

• The unique and powerful features of CUPS
• Installing and compiling the CUPS server
• Checking printer status, accepting and rejecting print jobs
• Restricting user access
• Setting different printer options, printing multiple copies
• Classes, client, server, and printing directives
• Important cupsd.conf directives that will help you manage network, server, browsing, and security options.
• Configuring manual and automatic print queues
• Communicating with single and multiple servers with clients
• Integrating with other systems like LPDs and Mac

Approach

This book takes a tutorial approach and each chapter contains step-wise instructions to perform specific tasks.

Who this book is written for?

This book is for Linux/Unix System Administrators interested in designing and setting up a CUPS network and provides enough knowledge to understand how the technology works, make decisions about deployment, and then implement a stable work environment. No knowledge in CUPS is required but readers need to be comfortable with working in the Linux/Unix environment. On the whole, readers should have basic knowledge of the Linux environment.