Hi.

Currently each individual Linux client access our printers directly.
Their configs are managed through puppet.
So far so good. We have a Windows server which does many things including acts as a print server for the few Windows machines.

So what are the advantages of the different ways to manage printing on the Linux machines?

We could have them all access the printers through the Windows server like the Windows machines. Or set up a Linux server to act as the Linux print server or leave as it is.

Any experiences in this that you can share would be appreciated.

Thanks

I'm old-school, and remember the days of the 'centralized' systems. One system with terminals, then one print-server for everyone on the network. Both stunk. Why? Anytime you centralize, you build in a single point of failure.

Think about it. Do you REALLY want 100 people or so, to lose print capabilities, because ONE machine is down, or is having some sort of problem?? If you've got people talking directly to printers now, leave it that way. Problems stay localized. If printerA goes down, you can easily move folks to printerB, while A is being fixed.

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Give each printer a cheap print server like this one: http://longshine.de/longshine/produc.../PS110_eng.pdf

That's what I did. Now ANY computer can print to ANY printer. You may ditch a few printers if you want to. And you can place all printers in a closet...

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Thanks all for the responses.

I was reading on a CUPS/Samba page and it was stressing that using a centralised spooler is the way to go as it allows better queuing and management of jobs.

But I can see your point of creating a single point of failure and disadvantage of that.

Perhaps a deep investigation on a per case basis is the only way to really no. But this situation doesn't warrant it so I thinking of leaving it as is.

Thanks for the feedback. More welcome.

Hi,

I've been using CUPS / Samba and find both pretty easy to set up, maintain and use. Non-computer people don't seem to have too much trouble configuring CUPS on systems, Samba/Cups plays nicely with OS X & Windows, and we all really like it. Of course we transitioned to CUPS after many years using LPD, so our system was already centralised, and we wished to upgrade whilst maintaining backwards compatibility.

If you have a system that works, though, why break - oop I mean change - it? (: If I was choosing a new printing set up I'd definitely use CUPS again. but that's just my 2 cents.

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Cups is GREAT. I used to run with LPRng and apsfilter. It was good, until I wanted to install the print servers. With CUPS this was all a matter of seconds. No thinking required. I'm a long time follower of the Penguin. Still, the ease of use of CUPS was an eye opener. Currently all systems run with CUPS and all (even the 2 Windows XP and Vista machines) print via the net (although setting up the latter two was a pain in the -well, you know) CUPS : immediate contact. Windows via wizard: still very hard to do. CUPS is cool....

http://fruttenboel.verhoeven272.nl/net/printsrv.html