From owner-freebsd-questions Sun May 20 21: 7:35 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from core.usrlib.org (CC2-861.charter-stl.com [24.217.115.99]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BA46837B424 for ; Sun, 20 May 2001 21:07:32 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from ajh3@core.usrlib.org) Received: by core.usrlib.org (Postfix, from userid 1001) id 08A2AA941; Sun, 20 May 2001 23:06:02 -0500 (CDT) Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 23:06:02 -0500 From: Andrew Hesford To: Damien Tougas Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Any opinions on CUPS or LPRng? Message-ID: <20010520230602.A87357@core.usrlib.org> References: <1225170000.990412777@sprig.tougas.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <1225170000.990412777@sprig.tougas.net>; from damien@carroll.com on Sun, May 20, 2001 at 10:39:37PM -0400 X-Loop: Andrew Hesford Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Sun, May 20, 2001 at 10:39:37PM -0400, Damien Tougas wrote: > Hello, > > I am looking at installing an alternate printing system on our network, and > was wondering if anyone had any experiences/suggestions regarding LPRng or > CUPS. > > The basic BSD LPD is working well for us, but is becoming unmanageable on > the client side. Every time we make printer changes on our print servers, I > have to propagate the change to all the clients, creating a separate spool > directory on each client for each printer it will access. I could do this > through creative scripting, but if I can achieve this through installing a > more scalable printing system, I would rather do that. > > Basically, it looks like my only two options are LPRng and CUPS. I tend to > lean towards LPRng because I am quite familiar with the LPD system, but I > am open to CUPS if it is a better solution. Is there anyone out there with > experience who can comment on either one of these packages? I am mostly > concerned with any issues regarding stability and reliability, but any > experiences positive or negative are welcome. > > --- > Damien Tougas > Systems Administrator > Carroll-Net, Inc. > http://www.carroll.com If you ask me, CUPS is a terrible solution. You have to pay for all but some basic filters, and I'm a cheapskate. Avoid CUPS like the plague if you don't want to put down cash for a printing system that is unfamiliar. Also, it has a whole host of unfamiliar daemons and configuration tools. There is no sense learning a new system when you can get along just fine with an existing system. Learning takes time, money, and opens you up to problems that piss off users. Believe me, I experience a great deal of frustration and anger when the apes who run my campus network decided to use Kerberos for authentication. If you don't like hate-mail, and hate being thought of as a complete idiot, do NOT implement a new an unfamiliar system. A lifetime of good service will never remove the curse of hatred and disrepect I keep on the morons in my campus network office, for one week of lousy administration. I like LPRng, I ran it a while back on a linux machine. It did just fine, with the only noticeable difference being the output of lpq. I never bothered to install it with FreeBSD, since the standard line printer system works just fine. -- Andrew Hesford ajh3@usrlib.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message