[ubuntu-uk] Dapper and Cups in a school environment

[tim matthews]

firstly, let me say how great it is that your school is using open 
source. that means that money not spent on commericial software, is 
money saved by the school and can be spent for other things.

from what I understand here, you want to use cups for some printers. 
your setup is very well done (thin clients, great stuff). however, I did 
find one limitation on ubuntu ... using cups.

Ubuntu expects you to use their panel interface for cups, not 
http://localhost:661/. I found this out the hard way, if I had known it 
would have only taken me five minutes to set up the printing on my 
ubuntu box!

maybe you might want to consider using the ubuntu server version .. 
maybe then you could use cups itself through its webinterface?

just my guess ... anyway, let me know the solution !

tim

Alistair Crust wrote:
> Hi,
>
> To fill you in I am from Skegness Grammar School an 800+ pupil school in
> Lincolnshire. We run Ubuntu Dapper as a thin client environment right
> throughout the school and use it to teach ALL curriculum lessons.
>
> Just recently we have had a few problems printing from the four LTSP
> servers we have. (we don't use edubuntu due to Local Disk Access,
> although in a few months we will be trying edgy on a test server. Anyway
> I digress). I think the reason is that we have the four app servers
> accessing the jetdirect enables printers directly insteed of on server
> managing all. We also would like to allow access to sertain printers
> from all machines but only from staff accounts, thus:
>
> My idea was to install a Dapper server and on it cupsys et al. Then
> administer via web (from a set number of machines, e.i. My office, staff
> room, anywhere the kids don't have access). 
>
> Problem is that the web interface is disabled by default.. not a problem
> I hear you cry. Wrong! after enabling the / and /admin sections via the
> cupsd.conf Allow directive the web site does indeed become accessible,
> problem is that when trying to add a printer the web interface is asking
> for an upgrade because I am not accessing it from https://. I know this
> is some kind of licence issue using ssl, but I don't want to use https.
> and even when I install openssl the thing still doesn't work. I have
> googled and there has been a few posts relating to my problem here but
> none that actually fix the problem, after trying the suggestions the
> trail just goes cold.
>
> Any help would be greatly appreciated.
>   
>