First, let me say that I have tried to get an answer for this on the Ubuntu forums, but what I could find seemed to be either out of date or for versions of Ubuntu other than Dapper Drake and many of the posts seemed to give different answers for trying to accomplished printer sharing in Ubuntu.

Some background:

I have 4 computers all of which have the desktop version of Ubuntu Dapper Drake installed and running fine. I am connected to the internet via Verizon DSL wired Westell 6100 DSL modem and I have the 4 computers connected to the modem and each other via a Netgear wired HUB (not router).

I have 1 HP Laserjet model 2100 printer which is hooked directly to 1 of the computers via LPT1/parallel port.

I can print to the printer fine when I set if up in Ubuntu as a LOCAL printer on the computer it is hooked to.

What I want to be able to do is to also print to this same HP printer from my other 3 computers. What was/is referred to in M/S windows as printer sharing.

1) In order to accomplish this do I set the printer up on the computer it is connected to as a LOCAL printer or as a NETWORK printer ?

And if it is as a NETWORK printer what method do I use (I think there are 4 different choices given under NETWORK printer) ?

And if it is NETWORK any advise on the parameters that are to go in various fields would be appreciated ?

2) Are there any changes/edits that need to be made to any printer related configuration files and if so, some details as they would relate to Ubuntu Dapper Drake would be appreciated ?

3) Then on the other 3 computers is there anything other than enabling the NETWORK PRINTER DETECTION setting under the GLOBAL SETTINGS tab that need to do in order to enable these computers to see and print to the printer ?

If there is some changes/edits that need to be made to any printer related configuration files, some details as they would relate to Ubuntu Dapper Drake would be appreciated.

I would be glad to send a copy of the configuration files (as they currently stand), if that would be of assistance.

Thanks.

I know of no reason why this has to be Dapper Drake dependent. By far the easyest way to share printers in linux is installing Cups. On the local machine you set up the printer as a local printer, and on the remotes it is a network printer.

I'm assuming you have IP connectivity between these machines. My print server is running Cups with a Lexmark laser printer, and I installed cups on Ubuntu ( an old laptop ) and printed in just a few minutes. I didn't use any of the Ubuntu tools for printing. Works like a charm.

When you say IP connectivity, do you mean SAMBA or perhaps NFS ? All 4 computers have access to the internet but as of right this moment I have NO "SHARING" between the 4 machines.

This is one of the questions that I had posed on the Ubuntu forums (but never received an answer to), is it necessary to have SAMBA or NFS in place for the CUPS to work ? My gut feel is that it is, but being inexperienced with Linux I don't know. I had posed that question in the vain, that was SAMBA necessary to the functioning of CUPS network printing or was that function built into Ubuntu/Linux aside from either SAMBA or NFS. Again, I never could get an answer to that question.

If I need one of these for CUPS to work, am I correct in that since all of the machines are running Ubuntu/Linux, I would setup NFS instead of SAMBA ?

Thanks for your assistance.

No, I mean does each machine have its own IP address? Can you ping from one machine to the other?

Positivley no, all you need is IP connectivity and cups on each box.

NFS is a way of sharing files without using windbloze file sharing. Samba is only necessary if you have a mixed network of windoze and linux or unix boxes.

All you need in a pure linux network is IP connectivity and cups. That is it.

You use a web browser to configure cups through port 632. Once you install cups, open a web browser ( doesn't matter which one you have ) and type at the location bar http://localhost:631 If cups is running you will get a screen woth about 5 choices. Configuration is pretty straight forward. Add a printer. You do need to know what linux driver you are going to use.

Here is teh link to cups, lots of info, doc etc.

http://www.cups.org/

No, I don't think I can ping the other machines. I tried a ping command at the terminal (I assume it works similar to M/S windows ping command) when I do ping ???-ubuntu-4 from ???-ubuntu-1 machine, I get unknown host.

When I pinged the name of the machine I was on (???-ubuntu-1) I got a timing listing that I eventually had to stop with Ctrl_C.

Here is what I see in the networking section of Ubuntu - administration.

Connection - Ethernet
General - ???-ubuntu-1
DNS - 192.168.1.1 , 192.168.1.1 ??home.westell.com
Hosts - Various IP addresses & aliases

Please note that under the HOST tab, the IP address for each of the 4 machines is the same thing for each IP type shown BUT the alias for each machine there are listings for each machines respective names, i.e. ???-ubuntu-1, ???-ubuntu-2, ???-ubuntu-3, ???-ubuntu-4 and the same applies for the aliases for the localhost listings.

Is this workable this way or do I need to assign static IP addresses ?

Thanks for your help.

To use the ping command, it is the same as any other system,

ping ip.address.of.machine, a real exammple would be:

ping 192.168.1.1

if the machine answers, your will see a response. Unknown host means the sender of the pings could not determine the IP address of the box you are trying to ping. The address can be resolved by a DNS server, or the /etc/hosts file if you have updated it.

O.K. I booted up my Ubuntu laptop to take a look at the Admin--> Networking stuff. This is the gui way of setting things up in Ubuntu. I mentioned /etc/hosts. This file is being updated by what you have in the Hosts tab.

The other thing that has me a little confused is the Westell 6100 DSL modem. A modem is just a modem, it can not assign IP addresses, or route. So, we need to understand just what this device is.

Today there are a lot of Modem/Routers all in one box. That is my guess. I did some googling trying to find out a little about this device, but I can't find the manufacturers site. Most of them list what their devices are. Do you know if this is a Modem and a router?

I think it must be, other wise the way things are hooked up, it should not work. If you don't know for sure, open a command prompt and do some pinging. First, run this command '/sbin/ifconfig' without the quotes. That will produce a few lines, in there you will see the current IP address of your machine. It should match the IP address on the connections-->properties tab.

Once you know your IP address, ping it, it should answer.

If for example the IP address is 192.168.1.2; then I would bet the router part IP address is 192.168.1.1 . Try pinging it. If it answers, you know you have a least one of the addesses of your network. The other thing you can do, open a browser, and type the IP address of your router/modem. If you get a screen, it is a router as well as a modem. This is how you normally configure these devices.

Try some of this, and let me know what you find. I don't think this is hard to fix, once we know what you really have.

Cliff:

Thanks. I am composing from at work. And will have to try more when I get back home tonight. But for what I have found so far. If I can believe what Verzion tells me, then the Westell 6100 is JUST a modem and NOT a router. And yes, when I put the Westell's IP 192.168.1.1 address into browser I get it's configuration utility. I along with Verizon had configured the information in this utility back when I was still using M/S Windows.

Also, I tried the localhost:631 and it seems to come up fine but I did not have time last night to play around with it.

Also, I did try the pinging again and when I try to ping 192.168.1.1 (the address for the Westell 6100 modem), it seems to just go into an endless loop. We have Tight VNC here at work and when I ping my work machine or say a network printer here at work, it sends 4 signals and receives 4 signals and then ends. I also tried pinging the IP address (127.?.?.?) that is shown in Ubuntu Network Admin. and again it gives me the endless loop thing.

As far as your comment about the result of your research on the Westell 6100, that does not suprise me. I have tried to find information on this piece of equiment before and boy was that basically a dead-end. And when I tried to actually call/telephone the manufacturer about it, they have a note on their phone system which tells you that if you are a Verizon customer that they are NOT going to talk to you about the modem and then when I try to get information about the modem from Verizon, the only thing they are will to do for you is to assist you with the configuration of the modem to get you on-line with them but then ONLY if you are using M/S windows operating system computers, i.e. no support for anything other than M/S and Mac.

I think I did mention that I am currently routing all 4 of the computers to the Westell 6100 modem thru a Netgear model EN108TP 8-port ethernet HUB. When I originally ordered service from Verizon they assured me that I could setup this way and be able get on-line from all 4 computers thru their facilities. And I can, because I can be connected to the internet from all 4 computers at the same time and my FOLDING-AT-HOME seems to have no problems with uploading it's information from each of the 4 computers, but it looks like networking the 4 computers my require a ROUTER instead of just a HUB. However, when I first setup Ubuntu, I did try SAMBA and I could do sharing and see directories/files from computer to computer but I did not reinstall SAMBA when I went back and re-installed Ubuntu later.

I am wondering what would happen if I tried to give each computer it's own static IP address as things currently stand (with the current modem and hub combination). I asked one of the Verizon reps about this and they seemed to think there was a possibility that this would elminate/break my ability to access the internet.

At this point I am really just wondering if I don't need a router instead of a HUB to interconnect the computers and if doing so at this point would require me to completely redo all of my Ubuntu installs and if so if I would be able to get Verizon to assist me in reconfiguring the Westell modem IF necessary in spite of the fact that I am using Ubuntu/Linux instead of M/S ?

P.S. - One other thing I forgot. A while back then I was still on M/S Windows and I was dabbling around with Tight VNC, I know that at that point I had a different IP address for each of the 4 windows computers because I could ping to the different address from each computer and I was using the same modem and HUB that I am currently using. So I am wondering if this problem is some kind of short coming in the Ubuntu operating systems or is it that I just need SAMBA or more likely NFS installed ?

Again, thanks.

I'm not at all surprised by Version and Westtell's attitudes, even the lack of linux support. My ISP is a lot better. They have some useful info on how to connect a Linux box, however I did't need their help. I worked in the indusrty at networking for a long time.

I still don't think Version knows what they are talking about with this modem. I have never seen a 'modem' with this type of configuration screen, lots of routers have it. One thing to prove my point, when you were all windows, did you define static IP's or not?

The default in windoze is DHCP, windoze looks for a DHCP server and requests an IP address. If that is how you ran, I suspect it was, then there is no more to guess about, that 'modem' has a router built in. It is likley supplying the IP addresses. For four hosts to work, each has to have its own IP address. The router is doing NAT, network address translation. ( standard function in most newer routers). The router keeps track of the hosts, who sent and received what packetts, and does all the address translation. On the ISP side you have one IP address, it belongs to the ISP's network. Your side is a private IP network. Example; 192.168.x.x addresses are class C private addresses and can not be sent over the internet. So, your 'modem' is running NAT for you and sorts out the packetts for each machine. I have 7 machines at home, three are lapys. One IP address on the ISP side.

What I would like you to do when at home tonight, is open a konsole on each machine, run the command '/sbin/ifconfig' without the quotes. Here is what the output looks like:
Note the HWaddr and inet addr fields for eth0. HWaddr = mac address of the ethernet card, and inet addr = assigned IP address.

Run that cammand, write down the results, it will confirm:

1. each machine has a unique IP address
2. you can always identify the box once you know the mac address. That is set in hardware by the card maker, and only changes if you change the card.

The loopback interface is so you can run throught the IP stack and get one application on your machine to talk to another.

Lets get this straight NO! There is no short coming in Ubuntu. The IP stack is complete in linux. If all you need to do is share a printer, you do not need samba, or NFS. Samba is used for a mixed Win linux network, to share files and printing between mixed OS's.

NFS I would recommend if you get to a point where you want to share files on your linux boxes, if you find FTP or ssh inadaquate. It is much easier to set up than Samba.

One last thing, you said if you run ping it goes on until you kill it. On linux that is a default. You can limit it. To see how do a 'man ping' I think it is the -c option to limit the ping. Try ping ipaddress -c 3 and see what happens.

Thanks, I will check all of this when I get home. But to answer one question, when I was using M/S, no I did not assign any IP address myself. All of this was on automatic. And I thought about this after I finished my previous post, but I bet if I go into the Verizon configuration utility from each of the different machines, it will probably give me that machines IP address.

Yeah, you are correct, when Verizon has support people that know less about networking than I do (and I assure you that is very little - I am however, fairly knowledgeable about build hardware systems (self-taught/school of hard knocks)), that is pretty bad.

Thanks.

Cliff:

I did not have a lot of time to work on it last night but from what I found, you have to be correct, the Westell 6100 IS a modem plus router. As a matter of fact, when I go into the configuration page for the Westell, it mentions router somewhere in the configurer and also in one place it has a place for the range of IP addresses to be assigned. Perhaps I should pass this along to Verizon.

I did the ifconfig command on each machine and it does show the IP address for each machine just fine.

One thing that I could not understand is how it decides which IP address to assigned to each of the machines. My machine #1 is IP 44, machine #2 is IP 47, machine #3 is IP 46 and machine #4 is IP 45. I tried switching the plugs to different ports on the Netgear HUB, but that seemed to make no difference.

Is the assignment of the IP addresses somehow related to maybe the age and/or type of the NIC ? Three (3) of the machines have various speed NICs that are on-board and the oldest machine #4, IP 45 has an old Intel 10/100 PCI card NIC.

I also was able to properly ping each of the machines.

Thanks for the commands. I suppose what I really need to do is to get me a Linux command book and study that thing like I use to study the old DOS commands.

What I don't quite understand is why in the Admin/Networking section of the Ubuntu GUI, that it would not show the real machine IP address numbers instead of those that start with 127, which like I said are the same on all four machines. Me thinks I am going to request that this be changed in Edgy Eft.

Hopefully, I will get a chance to try to get the printer networked this weekend. I will let you know how it goes.

Thanks, again for all you help. I have learned more from this one thread here on this site than I did in reading numerous postings at Ubuntu forum and making a number of request for information on their forum myself.

Have a great weekend.

Well, we are making progress. Now we know you do have a router, no need to go buy one.

As far as how do the IP addresses get assigned, it has more to do with which host makes a request first. The DHCP server will assign the first IP to the first requester. Some routers will then assign the IP's based on the MAC address. That is unique to the card. It is sometimes called a burned address, since it is "burned" during the manufacturing of the card. I can not tell you how that one works.

The important thing is now you know how to determine what IP address is assigned to each host.

Now when you have a bit of time, try the ping command between machines using the dotted decimal address you see with /sbin/ifconfig. example 'ping 192.168.1.45' wihtout the quotes...

I don't use the GUI much on Ubuntu. I installed KDE, my desktop of choice, so I rarley boot up with gnome. I also use Webmin to administer my machines. With it I can look at and change any network option I need to. ( I'm not suggesting you try that, at least not now ).

BTW, I'm on vacation right now. My internet access is limited. I will try and follow your thread, and help if I can.

Good luck, Hope this helps.

Cliff:

I finally got a chance to work on this some more this weekend. However, it was without much success !!!

The closest I could comes was getting the network printer setup on the second machine and when trying to print the test page, I would get a print status of STOPPED.

I think I have tried about every possible combination of parameters I can think of for the dev line in the network printer setup section of CUPS.

I will try to give you some more details on the parameters I tried when I get back home this evening.

P.S. - In the process, I set up one network printer in CUPS using the IP address of the machine the printer is actually LPT1ed to (and it did not work) and to this point I have NOT been able to get rid of / delete that printer no matter what I do. Keeps coming back to the browser saying ???IP address can not be found.

Thanks.

Just a short note to let you know I'm back from vacation. I have re-read the thread, I'll so some thinking and see if I can provide some more help. I need to boot up my laptop and take a look at what I have set up in Cups for my Lexmark printer, and what print driver I used.

Can you print to the printer on the locally attached machine through Cups? Bring up Cups and try test page locally. I know it worked through the Ubuntu setup tools.

Yes, I can print test page fine from either CUPS setup of local printer or from Ubuntu Admin/printing setup of local printer.

Just can not seem to be able to get it to print from another Ubuntu computer on the network.

I will send you some pararmeters that I have tried for the dev line parameters in the CUPS setup on the other machine when I get home this evening.

Thanks.

I believe you are almost there. I have been doing a little research, and I found this tutorial on how to set up linux to linux printing using cups. Here is the link -

http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/...ter_using_CUPS

Since your main problem seems to be the client 'seeing' the print server, have a look at your cupsd.conf file with this tutorial. Just about three things to make sure are correct. They are well documented here.

Second thing that surprised me a little; Ubuntu does some different things with printing. I discovered ( hadn't noticed this before ) the 'administration' functions within the Cups configuration tool (localhost:631) were 'disabled' within Ubuntu. I don't think this is an accident, I believe it is by design. I saw a message indicating I had to use the System-->Admin-->Printer tool to configure or administer a printer. Personally I don't like that. Here is a work around if you are interested. I found this on the Ubuntu forum.

First, so you can log on as root. Open a konsole and enter the command 'sudo passwd root' ( without the quotes ) and follow the prompts. Set a root password; don't loose it...

Personally I never like using sudo, since I have been able to log as root on every other distro I have used.

Second step. Form a konsole do a 'su' and use that new password. If you are successful, the prompt will change to a # sign. Now run the command 'adduser cupsys shadow' ( no quotes ). Now restart the cupsd with the command ( as root ) '/etc/init.d/cupsys restart'

If you log on to localhost:631 and click on the Admin function, you will be prompted for a user and password. The user is root, and use your root password. You will be able to modify the printer settings from here now.

For my printer, here is what I see.

Default Destination - 4039@192.168.1.21 The Device URI is 'socket'

It works for me. Let me know how it goes.

Hope this helps.