On Thu, 2001-10-25 at 14:04, Brian J. Murrell wrote: > On Thu, Oct 25, 2001 at 01:13:04PM -0500, Brad Felmey wrote: > > On Thu, 2001-10-25 at 07:56, Claudio wrote: > > > > I'll have to agree. This is just bone-dead dumb. I have the same issue - > > every time CUPS is updated or whatever on any of the gazillion machines > > here at work, I get to go find everything with browse=enabled and turn > > it off, otherwise the printer list is unmanageable. > > I don't have a large network of computers with CUPS installed, just my > two computers here at home. What is the issue? What happens with all > of these computers doing "CUPS browsing"? > > If there is a problem with CUPS browsing being enabled on all of those > computers, it sounds like it is more of an issue with CUPS than with > Mandrake's enabling of browsing in the distro. Maybe it is worthwhile > taking up the issue with the CUPS author(s).
No, it's a valid feature for those who choose to structure their network printing to use it. By turning on browsing by default, what happens is that every single PC using CUPS broadcast advertises on the network all the printers it has set up to use. Every other PC picks up these broadcasts and adds them as available printers. If you're using direct printing (like my company does), this means you have each and every machine advertising "Ricoh 551 4th floor", "Optra S 3rd floor QA", and so forth ad infinitum. Then, when you go to print something, and choose a printer, and you end up with a browse list of literally thousands of entries, even if you have much fewer printers than that, because each machine is presenting the available printers, which means you have the same ones over and over and over in the browse list. If they're named the same on each machine, it's then even more difficult to determine the one you're looking for in this gargantuan list of "available" printers. Most PCs are only going to be set up for one or two printers at the most, and don't need access to all of them, much less all of them shown multiple times. -- Brad Felmey
