Quoting Didier Kryn (k...@in2p3.fr):
This is fine if you always work in the same place. During my
professional life, I used to travel to various labs and found it
convenient to automatically find, in the cups menu of my laptop, a
list of the local printers. And to always have the list up to date
when the computing department installed/removed old/new printers.
I respect that. For the sake of community knowledge, I'll also tell
you what I do as an alternative:
When I visit a new location, I look around for a networked printer,
and see if it happens to have a label on it including its IP address
(usually not). If not, I can usually figure out from the printer's
front-panel controls how to make it print out an information sheet to
proclaim its network access details. (For example, all HP laser
printers have a standard way to do this.) If I cannot easily figure
that out, I type its make/model into a Web browser to look up how on
the Web. Either way, within a couple of minutes, I know details of
how to print on it, usually over my choice of several protocols (lpr,
ipp, etc.)
Or, if there's someone technical handy, I lazily ask 'Hey, how would I
print directly to this printer?'
And a possibly amusing cautionary tale: After the dot-com collapse, a
small firm named California Digital Corporation (CDC) picked up the
hardware business that Larry Augustin decided my old firm VA Linux
Systems could no longer compete in, resuming manufacture and sale of
VA Linux's models (and successors to those) under their new brand.
(Incidentally, they showed that Augustin's pessimistic conclusion had
been in error, as they were prosperous in that industry segment for
quite a few years, and had numerous achievements to boast, including
building for Lawrence Livermore Labs the #2 HPC cluster in the world,
a 1024 quad-Itanium computing cluster named 'Thunder'.)
CDC was run by a husband and wife firm, the Aruns. I was for a while
their system administrator and de-facto IT guy. One morning, I walked
in, and Ms. Arun was very vexed, because she said that printing was
not working anywhere around the firm. Notably, she said there had
been a power outage right at the beginning of the business day.
I conducted tests of printing to several of the HP JetDirect printers
across the network, and everything worked fine. Moreover, all of the
technical staff were having no problem at all printing. It was just
the executive staff reporting total printing failure.
Getting to the bottom of the problem required looking at the printing
setup objects of those people's -- yes -- Microsoft Windows
workstations. Each of them had a printer object that was defined as a
queue on the controller's (the main company accountant's) workstation.
Every single executive was routing all print jobs through that poor
fellow's workstation, before those jobs then recrossed the network out
to the printer near the executive offices. (Meanwhile, the technical
staff were enjoying faster, more reliable, more direct printing.)
As it happened, the controller's workstation had an ATX power supply
that was set to put the workstation in standby power mode after a
power loss, rather than come back online. So, from
I politely asked 'Why aren't people printing directly to the executive
LaserJet?' -- and, predictably, heard 'How do you do that?'
It seems that someone had originally helped the controller print to
the executive printer and, in so doing, had created on that
workstation a Network Neighbourhood queue object, advertised to the
network. Subsequently, every time someone on the executive staff set
up printing, he/she groped in Network Neighbourhood, found the
accountant's printing object, and assumed that was the only way to
reach the executive printer.
I re-did all of the executives' printing so that they did JetDirect
printing straight to the printer, replacing their convoluted and
fragile workaround.
This is part of why I would rather not trust to automated printer
discovery. I'd rather know what I'm doing, instead of assuming
someone else knows what's good for me, as that often is not the case.
