From: Frank <fmoody-ug-wlug@moodman.org>
On Fri, Sep 03, 2004 at 05:26:53PM -0400, Keith Wright wrote:
From: "Son Nguyen" <snguyen@hotmail.com>
I would recommend not using LPRng. It is too old.
And the web interfaces are generally a sign of civilization moving from the 'How can we eat?' stage past the 'Why do we eat?' and straight to the 'Where shall we have lunch?' stage...
I would have thought that 'Why do we eat?' would be a higher stage than 'Where do lunch?', but perhaps it is just a matter of taste. Which question seems more civilized may depend upon whether you are a French philosopher facing a plate full of jellied liver, or a film producer facing a starlet. Though not yet civilized, the web interface may nevertheless be an advance from savagery to barbarism. I worry about security.
I can print from the printer/Linux machine, but when I tried to use the much-touted CUPS web-based set-up to connect to the printer from another Linux machine, it went totaly wonky. Sometimes it would take me to some crazy random place in the Internet, to pictures of buildings that had the same name as my server machine, ...
You had some misconfiguration going on there probably...
Well, I hadn't configured it yet! The machine with the printer has Redhat, Samba, and Cups installed and working fine. The Windows laptop prints; bin/lpr.cups on the Linux server prints. It seemed like it should be easy to make another Linux/Cups machine print, so I did "man lpr", which said a few things not to the point and SEE ALSO CUPS Software Users Manual, http://localhost:631/documentation.html So I did that, which gave me a page: cups> The CUPS web server provides a user-friendly "wizard" interface cups> for adding your printers. Rather than figuring out which device cups> URI and PPD file to use, you can instead click on the cups> appropriate listings and fill in some simple information. Enter cups> the following URL in your web browser to begin: cups> http://localhost:631/admin cups> Click on the Add Printer button to add a printer. So I did that and nothing worked. I just tried it again, to refresh my memory what went wrong. It came up with a login box. I told it my /etc/passwd name and password (Is that what it wants? Why would it need it, I have been logged on all day? Maybe it wants some kind of printer specific name?) It just shows the login box again. I think I got past that point last time by telling it my root password, but I don't feel like trying that again right now. It was no help in setting up the printer, it just showed some forms to fill in with inscrutable labels, and occasionally locked up or hijacked my browser off to random web sites. I remembered that I had given it my password, and I had no idea why it was communicating with anything outside my local network. Paranoia strikes deep, so I stopped.
Your web browser had its auto-magical lookup functionality turned on and went looking for what you specified when it couldn't connect to the address you specified.
I really don't think there is anything wrong with my browser (Firefox), it has never done anything at all like that before. If I had ever seen any hint of an auto-magical lookup functionality I would have shot it.
Honestly, CUPS is not that hard to configure and use these days.
Well, I didn't mean to insult your baby, I was just telling my experience. I have Cups as installed by Redhat, if you could write or point me to a one page HOWTO send a file on this machine to the working printer on the other, that would be great. Maybe we could send it back to the Cups project. The documentation I have seen manages to be both voluminous and elliptical and lacks a short introduction to getting the damned thing working in the simplest case.
There was a period of history where it was pretty difficult to set up correctly but it has been pretty solid for the last couple of years.
Maybe you have learned to do a difficult thing so well that you forgot why it was difficult.
And, even in the difficult years, it offered a level of functionality not readily available with the rest of tools in play at the time.
But if you don't want functionality, just want to send a file upstairs in fewer steps than ftp and telnet...
CUPS is probably something you want to look into...
I looked into it. It was deep and dark and I couldn't see the bottom. I got scared and ran away.
And I'd recommend it to the original poster.
Near as I can remember the original poster asked about a photo- printer with a USB interface. I don't dis-recommend Cups, but I've told my story and I'm sticking to it.
(Typos and general icky-ness of the email I apologize for, had to recreate it from a bounce message as I discovered a bit of misconfiguration on my recently moved email server...)
Every line came padded out with blanks to 80 columns. I took them out in the reply. Please don't accuse me of misquoting you. -- Keith