My CUPS runneth over....

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I was asked recently by one of my clients about Linux printing.  You see, they were about to embark on a conversion in their environment going from a proprietary printing solution running on Legacy UNIX and they wanted to host it all on their much more agile, much less expensive linux servers.

I was excited to share my experiences.  Our old group had configured a home-grown LAMP solution around CUPS that worked out fairly well for us.  For those of you out there thinking about hosting printing on Linux, this article might help steer you the right direction:

How do I set up a master print server using CUPS?
https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/solutions/55880

And once you've got it setup, better logging might be of interest:

How to enable and capture CUPS debugging logs
https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/articles/5461

CUPS certainly isn't the only way to go, but a lot of times a FOSS solution  works really, really well.  So what do you all think?  Have any great cost-savings projects where you implemented CUPS or some other tool for printing?  Have any good 3rd-party products you'd raise your hand to endorse to streamline operations?  We'd LOVE to hear from you!

Christopher Robinson's picture
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JS Red Hat Active Contributor 215 points
4 June 2013 4:10 PM

Hello Christopher,

Good starting point here, we are seeing more and more customers utilize CUPS for their client/server and network printing environments. CUPS in Red Hat provides many linux drivers for common old and new printer makes and models including the hplip package for HP model printers.

I have worked many cases where customers are able to quickly setup complex printing environments. Many Red Hat Enterprise Linux users utilize printers that accept/filter and print a high-volume of print jobs and CUPS provides this ability, including high availability to ensure print jobs are still completed if a printer stops functioning.

 

Christopher Robinson's picture Red Hat Guru 3152 points
5 June 2013 7:41 PM

That sure sounds great.  One thing commonly overlooked with something as core as printing typically is high-availabiluty and fail-over (since printing, once set up, is much like power or water...you only realize there's a problem when they're "off").  It's great to hear that CUPS is flexible enough to fulfill those needs!  Thanks for sharing Justin!

 

-Chris

rhn-engineering-sghosh's picture Red Hat Pro 534 points
6 June 2013 6:08 AM

Wondering if any one has setup a HA CUPS environment? Anything we can do to make the experience easier?

Typical things to consider:

  • shared access to print spooler directories
  • consistency in printer defnitions and filter configurations
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