Hi,
Let me first introduce myself, sine you people probably never heard about me :).
I'm a student at the Eindhoven University of Technology. With a team of 4 students we are responsible for Linux support at the faculty of Electrical Engineering.
Tim Waugh asked me to help thinking about a new printing solution, as a reply on a mail of me on the config list.
I read the posts here about that subject and I would like to share my opinion on this matter:
First I would like to state that there won't be any solution if CUPS doesn't improve.
The problem that eggcups tries to adress (authentication) isn't solved if there is a chain of CUPS servers involved. If CUPS can't communicate back, then the user still can't authenticate. So CUPS should implement a 2-way IPP protocol.
Then eggcups can be reduced to listening to HAL messages in order to display the print queue and pop up authentication dialogs. By not implementing a full CUPS server, it has less system resource usage, which is a good thing I think.
Second if CUPS supports signed browse packets, than we have an 'easy' solution of identifying fake printers on a large network.
For the configuration part: gnome-cups-manager does quite a nice job on this.
Than we only need some decend tool to configure the server itself.
Just my 2 cents,
Remco Poelstra
