Automating Printing Configuration

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.