Re: [SLE] Serving Printers from SuSE?

From: Johannes Meixner (jsmeix_at_suse.de)
Date: 04/20/04

  • Next message: John Andersen: "Re: [SLE] A better SuSE Support DB?: was something else" 
    Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2004 09:05:08 +0200 (CEST)
To: suse-linux-e@suse.com

    Hello,

    On Apr 20 04:53 Graham Smith wrote (shortened):
    > Just a note if using the raw option you may have to alter the two mime files
    > in /etc/cups as per the notes appearing therein.
    > see /etc/cups/mime.types and /etc/cups/mime.convs for details

    Do you really need it on your machine?
    Which CUPS version?
    Which case of printing (e.g. printing from Windows via Samba)?

    For me it works as described in the /etc/cups/mime.types and
    /etc/cups/mime.convs comments:
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------
    # Uncomment the following type and the application/octet-stream
    # filter line in mime.convs to allow raw file printing without the
    # -oraw option.
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------
    # Uncomment the following filter and the application/octet-stream type
    # in mime.types to allow printing of arbitrary files without the -oraw
    # option.
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------

    I.e. with an explicite "-o raw" option you can always force raw
    printing but without an explicite "-o raw" option the CUPS filtering
    system would reject a unknown MIME type with the
    "client-error-document-format-not-supported" IPP message.

    This is perfectly what you normally want to avoid that a user
    prints unsupported data types directly on the printer which would
    result that most printers print tons of sheets with meaningless
    characters because most printers fall back to ASCII printing
    when the data type is unknown for the printer.

    But if the user knows that it is already printer specific data
    then it is always possible to skip any CUPS filtering by printing
    it with the "-o raw" option.

    In contrast when the "application/octet-stream" lines are activated
    in /etc/cups/mime.types and /etc/cups/mime.convs then the CUPS
    filtering system would fall back to raw printing in case of any
    unknown MIME type.
    A user can now accidentally "print" tons of sheets with meaningless
    characters because the user cannot know which data types are not
    supported by the CUPS filtering system. For example one CUPS filtering
    system may support printing of DVI files and another CUPS filtering
    system may not support it - see
    http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/2004/01/pohletz_print_dvi_90.html
    In particular on network printers this can be really annoying because
    normally there is nobody watching the network printer and therefore
    the printer normally prints continuous until it runs out of paper.

    Regards
    Johannes Meixner 

    -- 
SUSE LINUX AG, Maxfeldstrasse 5                 Mail: jsmeix@suse.de
90409 Nuernberg, Germany                    WWW: http://www.suse.de/
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