Automating Printing Configuration
Jon Finke
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Abstract
Maintaining the printing configuration files for a large site (400
machines, 60 public printers, 40 private printers, 30 print spoolers)
can be a major job. At RPI, we developed a system that will
automatically generate the printer configuration file for any machine,
depending on what printers are driven by that machine. It also allows
us to only have a printer appear only on a subset of machines, rather
than on all machines.
This paper describes the design and deployment of the system. We use
a relational database to manage the printer information, printer type
attributes, host grouping and to track hosts using the system. All
sources and related information are available for anonymous FTP.
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