[Samba] CUPS vs lprng

[Chris Douglass]

I serve about 50 printers via Samba. Here are my experiences - 
LPRng - This backend I have found to be much stronger than CUPS, but I
didn't use it for any server side processing. All drivers had to be
installed from some other workstation. In my case, installing drivers
for all OS's would only work from an XP machine, not Win2K. Otherwise,
this worked very well.
CUPS- I migrated to ESP PrintPro about 3 months ago. PrintPro made
obtaining all the correct drivers and backends much simpler (there is
only one, instead of CUPS + ESP GS + cupsomatic + HPIJS + etc,etc...).
It seems to provide better naming of the jobs, displays user name and
job on the printer display menu when printing, and can add printers via
the cusaddsmb feature, which works A LOT better for remote site
management. Plus there is the web based printer administration, and with
ESP there is a GUI app that works pretty well. CUPS was easier to load
balance amongst servers as well. On new printers, the jobs seem to
process faster than with LPRng also. We have several HP 4300/4200 series
printers that start printing instantaneously, even during high traffic
periods. 

Overall, Linux print servers have kicked the snot out of NT print
servers, and CUPS is much nicer and more complete to work with than
LPRng. 

Installing print drivers locally becomes unsustainable if you have any
significant number of users or printers. My thoughts would be to stay
well clear of this.
Your mileage may vary.
-Chris


On Thu, 2003-11-06 at 15:55, Douglas Phillipson wrote:

> Could I get some opinions on which type of Samba based printing is 
> easier, CUPS or LPRNG, or just bybass Samba altogether.  I'm looking at 
> the Printing HOWTO by Kurt Pfeifle (Printing Support in Samba 3.0) and 
> both look really complex.  Anyone out there have any experience with 
> printing services in Samba?  Should I just stay away from samba printing 
> and go direct to Network printers? What are the advantages of a samba 
> print server as opposed to installing printer drivers on the client and 
> printing to a network printer?
> 
> Any opinions are appreciated
> 
> Regards
> 
> DSP

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