Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
On Sat, Nov 10, 2007 at 04:30:51AM +0000, Jacob Meuser wrote:
On Fri, Nov 09, 2007 at 07:15:11PM -0700, Predrag Punosevac wrote:
Any strong opinion on LPD vs LPRng vs CUPS issue? I am not a
professional system administrator and there is way too much Linux and
CUPS around me for my taste. I want to hear from the serious people what
are the benefits of one system over the another.
lpd - part of the base system. lightweight and very reliable.
CUPS - relatively easy set up and ability to tweak options "on the
fly".
lprng - never used it.
On OpenBSD, I've never used anything but lpd with a text-mode dot-matrix
printer (no print filters).
On Debian, I've used lpd (they use OpenBSD's), LPRng, but never CUPS.
On Debian, you can use CUPS' foomatic-printfilters to get CUPS'
printfilters without installing the whole CUPS infrastructure (to save
disk space). I've used foomatic-printfilters with LPRng and straight
lpd. I don't like the CUPS way, it seems like overkill to me. Then
again, if your printer driver isn't in the standard gs then you may need
a different gs. On debian, where everything is broken up in packages,
you can get the gs-esp from CUPS and use it as a drop-in replacement for
gs-gpl with lpd/apsfilter.
It really is a piece-together thing unless you bow to CUPS and take the
whole lot.
The difference between lpd and LPRng is one of access control. Having
the fine-grained access control comes at the price of more difficult
setup (more docs to read). I also haven't seen any updates to it for a
few years so I wonder about any security support.
Once you get your printer setup to take a ps file, it will be able to
take anything else once its converted to ps. Most browsers, for
example, do this.
Doug.
After the Jacob's letter I wanted to clear to myself the issue of driver
vs PPD files. Apparently all my printer were using
Ghostscript drivers and I always have Ghostscript on my computers
because of TeX. I do remember when I was running ./SETUP
script for apsfilter on FreeBSD box which uses LPD when I was prompted
to select the driver it was always from Ghostscript collection
which was automatically found by apsfilter. PPD is of course just
PostScript Descriptor for non PostScript printers ( I have never
even seen postscript printer in my life as I was always poor).
Apparently CUPS is also smart enough to realize that there is
Ghoastscript on the system.
After reading more stuff of about printers I believe that there is
definitely security benefit of keeping LPD on OpenBSD machines
(of course FreeBSD as well). CUPS seems way too vulnerable. Am I right
about this security.
It seems to me that LPRng just has more fancy way of creating
/etc/printcap file comparing to LPD. The project was abanded by its
creator 2005 and then picked up by someone else. I wonder if I had
200-300 printers attached to my printer server how easy hard would be to
set those using only LPD.
As LPD is good enough itself to set the plain text to printer I want to
see what is the easiest way to tell printer how to understand ps files
If that could be done with build in filter in LPD or the one that come
with base installation (I have to read more about this) then everything
else would be irrelevant and unnecessary. I could just edit printcup
file by hand and have the same or better functionality than
with CUPS.
Apparently old system administrators didn't have any problem with above.
just by editing printcup files
