[13] in athena10
Re: Debathena Gutsy updates
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan Reed)
Mon Dec 10 11:58:35 2007
Cc: Tim Abbott <tabbott@mit.edu>, athena10@mit.edu
Message-Id: <DA25A9DA-C319-483C-AF76-6A8005EBA483@mit.edu>
From: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@MIT.EDU>
To: Greg Hudson <ghudson@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <1197304909.6063.6.camel@error-messages.mit.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v915)
Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2007 11:58:22 -0500
On Dec 10, 2007, at 11:41 AM, Greg Hudson wrote:
> I believe authentication is only turned off for cluster printers, not
> dorm printers, although that may be more a matter of accident than
> careful policy review.
Most dorm printers are not authenticated. Some dorms do require
authentication because they mistakenly think it is a good idea to
track print jobs and bill users or implement quotas. As far as
Residential Computing goes, we would be ecstatic if we no longer
provided authenticated printing as an option for dorm printers. But
that is probably a policy decision that needs occur in a different
forum (owls?).
I seem to recall being told once upon a time that you still needed to
authenticate with Kerberos if you were printing from a non-MIT IP
address, but presumably the VPN can solve that problem (although using
Athena with the VPN requires Effort(tm) ), or we can decide we don't
care about Athena machines that are not at MIT/CSAIL/WHOI/Lincoln/
wherever.
> I've heard that you can set up lpr as a back end to cups somehow, and
> that's how stock RHEL support does printing at the moment. Of course,
> from my perspective it would be a lot easier if we could avoid
> installing any special software and just print with what comes
> installed
> on Ubuntu, but I believe that requires changing the server
> infrastructure.
I have a klpr backend for CUPS that was used in the OS X 10.3 KLPR
solution. The hardest problem has always been getting the tickets.
Something on the front end with access to the user's ticket cache
needs to pass the tickets to the backend where they can be used by
lpr. Of course, since Ubuntu uses files as ticket caches, presumably
the backend (if it runs as root), could steal them, but that assumes
that user's don't modify their default ticket cache location, and is
probably a bad idea anyway. Another problem is whether the GUI
printing subsystem makes it easy to use backends that did not ship as
part of CUPS (Apple manages to do this, GNOME fails miserably, IMHO).
Switching to a CUPS infrastructure would indeed seem to be the best
solution, but that's also a discussion for another forum. A CUPS
infrastructure would also (I believe) allow users to browse for
printers rather than having to add them one by one, which would mean
less documentation to maintain.
-Jon
