-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hello *,
Ivan Krstic (whom some of you know from LinuxWorld SF 2004) and me have put some dozens of hours into setting up scripts and playing with cups and sane to achieve transparent printer and scanner selection, based on the terminal the user sits at, and making it easy configurable. The situation this will come into real life practice is that of a large LTSP installation with lots of workstations connected to HP Laserjet 3020 (which are all-in-one devices with a scanner on top), but others without such devices. We wanted the users to not be aware of the fact that any printer selection is necessary (same for scanner), and it should be configurable in a single text file. What we did in particular was to write wrappers for "cupsdoprint" and "lpr" as well as "scanimage", that skim through a text-mode config file listing all MAC addresses, IP addresses and the printer/scanner to be expected to be used. We defined a printer at USB port /dev/null (printing can no way fail, so printer will never be stopped by cups because of device failure...) with the name of "Printrouter" (or $MAGICPRINTER.... :-) set as standard print device, and cupsdoprint will basically grab all print jobs to that device and reroute them to the correct printer. A nice secondary effect is that there's now a handmade script ltsp-update-terminal-list that will, if run after changes to the list-of-terminals-file, update the dhcp daemon configuration with all clients, and update the CUPS configuration so that CUPS knows about all printers attached to "the network". Same for Sane scanning, basically. Now what I'm interested to know: Is there any development in ltspadmin or separately going into the direction of having central configuration of all terminals? As we are doing terminal-dependant print routing, using dynamic IP allocation is out of question anyway, and so having a central source of information seems a good idea for me. Another thought how to realize similar things would be to extend the lts.conf by two parameters: For example, if you write an appropriate parser (which I'd see no problem in), you could use your lts.conf like the following: [default] XSERVER = vesa [ws100] X-IP = 10.0.2.100 X-MAC = 00:de:ad:00:be:ef X-PRINTTO = ws101 .. standard ltsp configuration Now thinking about it, I don't understand why we didn't go that way right at the beginning.... However if you enter all non-default terminals like this, one could extract and create the dhcpd.conf, /etc/hosts and others from this file quite easily, taking the burden of doing lots of manual configuration. Any default terminal would be cared for by the dynamic address allocation of DHCP probably.... Just collecting thoughts and opinions, I'd surely like to get lots of $0,02. Best regards, and happy new year to all hoopy froods out there ;-) Anselm -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFB1ay6RGDyvz+XrnkRAjobAKCKRuy6G3JLfcrsJ4uYapRJv8e5eACdF6gB b5H6Qt75QoMeWE3g0qa7LNA= =Hl3A -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ------------------------------------------------------- The SF.Net email is sponsored by: Beat the post-holiday blues Get a FREE limited edition SourceForge.net t-shirt from ThinkGeek. It's fun and FREE -- well, almost....http://www.thinkgeek.com/sfshirt _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net
