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Printer Management Console?

Posted by Cliff on from the care-and-feeding-for-your-printer-farm dept.

GoRK asks: "I maintain a Samba server, the purpose of which is to serve a small farm of printers (5-10) to our Windows clients. These printers range from parallel-port-connected inkjets to network-connected color laser printers and high-volume copiers. I am interested in a printer management console which could provide a simple (read: cursor-keys) interface to someone who manages printing (read: copy boy). Ideally the console would allow someone to reorder document queues, delete documents from the queue, restart lpd, and pause printing on certain devices. Another extremely slick feature would be the ability to tag a queue'd item to save and reprint again later. Does anything like this already exist for Linux either in a free or commercial product? lpc works fine for me, but it's not exactly friendly and not exactly feature-rich, especially for the copy boy. "

8 comments

  1. Re:hmm... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    i wanted to clean out the print queue remotely without root perms. lpr checks (via getuid()) for root perms when it cleans out the queue..not really feasible for a web browser running as nobody. i modified it to skip the checks and run as default in root mode and chmod u+s'd it to give it root perms. this allows cleaning out the queue via the web..running lpr with output redirected to a web page also allows you to see the queues in real time. Its effectively a web based print queu system (altho crude) and pretty simple to implement.

  2. Moderators? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    My post on a web-based lpr interface that I wrote in PHP was deleted. I have about 300 users who use it to manage 4 dozen printers (of greatly varied capabilities from color Postscript to line printers), and I thought it was pretty nice. Sigh, jokes are moderated-up now and technical posts are simply deleted.

  3. Printer Management Console by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I run a similar SAMBA system and have found printop to be very useful

  4. hmm... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    i believe Cisco was doing some stuff like this and they released a better(?) print system..i thinks its called CUPS...alternatively theres always lprng of course...i personally just hacked a couple of shell scripts and a custom lpr to do it and have a web console that does everything for me...but thats me. if you want my scripts & custom lpr let me know and i'll upload it. its not much, but it works pretty well.

    1. Re:hmm... by ixx · · Score: 1

      I would be intrested. What did you have to do to
      lpr it self BTW.

    2. Re:hmm... by GoRK · · Score: 2

      Well, I have to say that I have tried LPRng, but it still doenst give dummies the control they need. People were even more confused when i tried to explane how to clear the queue with lprng than with lpr. The wrappers didn't help that much either. So I went back to regular old LPR. I found a program on freshmeat called CLPQ, but it really doesnt do much of anything. I've been hacking at it a bit trying to add more features (especially LPRng support and a workaround for the root daemon problem). I'd like to see your scripts, but I don't know if you'll get this since you posted as AC...

      At any rate if anyone's interested, CLPQ could use some work. The goals of CLPQ were what I was asking for; too bad it's only a hack!

      GoRK

  5. Try this... by Cerb · · Score: 1

    LPRNG

  6. Check this by vitus · · Score: 2

    Couple of years ago I wrote simular thing which is essencially a curses-based frontend to lpq Try it