[263] in athena10
Re: Athena 10 on ashdown04 cluster machine: installation report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Mon Jun 23 11:12:19 2008
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: Evan Broder <broder@mit.edu>
Cc: ashdown-webmaster@mit.edu, athena10@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <485D8D34.4050806@mit.edu>
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Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2008 11:11:34 -0400
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On Sat, 2008-06-21 at 16:22 -0700, Evan Broder wrote:
> For the long term, though, it seems
> that the word is coming down from on high that authenticated printing is
> on its way out.
Let me elaborate on this:
As time goes on, it becomes harder and harder to provide useful client
support for authentication-required lpd printing queues. This situation
applies to all platforms: OSX, Windows, stock RHEL 4, Athena 10, etc..
The only code base for doing this sort of printing with our current
infrastructure is lprng, which is pretty much an orphaned child in the
open source world. (It is also possible to do authenticated printing
with the CUPS framework, but for technical reasons it is not easy for us
to deploy.)
In the long run, I would like lprng to die at MIT, and I think that
opinion is reflected by my coworkers in IS&T who care about the issue.
For people who still wish to operate authentication-required printing
queues, I've created the debathena-lprng package, which can be installed
alongside CUPS but uses different command names (mit-lpr, mit-lpq,
etc.). My vision was that people printing to cluster printers and other
"normal" printers would use CUPS, and people printing to
authentication-required printers would have to use the alternative
command names.
In the interest of providing a smoother experience, Evan is working on
developing front-end scripts so that lpr and friends will automatically
choose between CUPS and lprng depending on the printer name.
