A machine that sends jobs to another machine for printing is called a client and the machine that accepts the job is called a print server. A client can also be a print server if it is directly connected to a printer.
One of the biggest advantages of CUPS is that it allows you to set up a universal print server which can work with almost all printer connection types and most of the printing protocol. The following figure shows that CUPS doesn't only accept print jobs from a local application, but also support the clients working on different platforms. There are various methods to configure clients in CUPS.
In this section, we are going to check how the CUPS clients working on different platforms can be configured. CUPS can work with different clients such as CUPS/IPP client, LPD client, windows client, Mac client, and so on.
Client set up in CUPS depends on the configuration of two things:
Client set up in CUPS depends on the configuration of two things:
You can configure print queues either manually or automatically. Let's discuss this in detail.
Manual Configuration of Print Queues
This is one of the most tedious methods for configuration of client machines. The lpadmin
command can be used to configure each remote queue manually. The following is an example of:
Here, cupsprinter
and cupsserver
are the names of the printer and the hostname, of the print server. You can also use IP address instead of hostname here. This command needs to be repeated for each remote printer being setup.
It is recommended that you configure the CUPS print queues manually, when large numbers of client machines are present. It is very difficult for any administrator to handle numerous client machines. In such a scenario, the clients...
In this chapter, we have discussed integration of the CUPS systems with different clients and systems. Today, support for IPP has made this integration really easy. Also, CUPS provides strong support for other protocols, and this makes it easy for CUPS to work with other systems.