What This Book Covers

Chapter 1 covers the history of UNIX printing systems which includes traditional printing systems such as Berkeley printing system and System V printing System. We will also cover how CUPS evolves as a printing system, along with the architecture of CUPS.

Chapter 2 checks the pre-requisites for downloading and installing CUPS software. It also includes restarting CUPS service and accessing it via web interface.

Chapter 3 discusses the printer drivers that CUPS supports. We will also see how to manage printers and jobs using the Command-Line Tool (lpadmin) and the Web GUI Interface. This will include how to add, modify, delete, stop, and share printers, setting up options on printers, and how to cancel, move, restart jobs, and so on.

Chapter 4 looks at how to group multiple printers (printer classes), and how to manage them using the command-line tool and the web interface as in the previous chapter.

Chapter 5 covers the topic of system requirements for a CUPS print server. This chapter mainly discusses the server configuration file cupsd.conf and its directives, and the configuration files for printers (printers.conf), and classes (classes.conf).

Chapter 6 looks at setting up a client on various platforms such as UNIX/Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X using protocols such as LPD (Line Printer Demon), IPP (Internet Printing Protocol), and SMB (Server Message Block). It also has a section on how to use printer setups along with other printing systems.

Chapter 7 covers how we set up quotas on all CUPS users using the command-line tool, and an overview of the page_log file. This chapter also covers other accounting tools that can work with CUPS. Here, we discuss PyKota in detail.

Chapter 8 looks at monitoring CUPS using the lpstat command, and has an overview of the access_log and the error_log files. We will also see how Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) helps CUPS discover the printer and help other networking tools such as Cacti in managing printers.

Chapter 9covers an overview of how CUPS recognizes different file formats with the help of the mime.types file. This chapter also covers how CUPS uses various filters to convert one file format into another specified in the mime.convs file.

Chapter 10 looks at how TCP/IP printers can be managed. This will also cover the support of encryption and various authentication methods such as basic, digest, and Kerberos. This chapter will also cover the topic on a possible Denial of Service (DoS) that can occur in CUPS.