We use the “Common Unix Printing System” (CUPS) as a central service for printing to all devices.

Quick overview: 

Print servers at DESY: cups.desy.de (internal) & desyguestprint.desy.de (external)

PrintURI: cups.desy.de:443/printers/<printer> (encrypted, internal; use unencrypted port 631)

General information about CUPS: https://openprinting.github.io/cups/

On centrally administered UNIX machines, the CUPS server is pre-configured. You can access the printers on the pre-configured server via all standard graphical print dialogues and command-line tools.

Local printers are ‘normally’ detected by CUPS on the host and additionally integrated. 

Integrating the DESY CUPS servers on non-DESY-administered computers

Network affiliation is crucial for accessing the servers; on the guest network/Eduroam, please use ‘desyguestprint.desy.de’. From the internal network, use ‘cups.desy.de’.

Steps to integrate the CUPS server:

Edit the file “/etc/cups/cups-browsed.conf” (the path may differ; the package may need to be installed) as follows.

# Use BrowsePoll to poll a particular CUPS server
BrowsePoll cups.desy.de


Start or restart cups and cups-browsed!

The printers should now be visible in the usual print dialogues without affecting your local printer installation.

On the guest network, use “BrowsePoll desyguestprint.desy.de” in the same way as above.

 

In both cases, you can sensibly reduce the number of printers displayed by using a filter rule, e.g.:


BrowseFilter name ^it|^pub (all printers beginning with “it” or “pub”)

BrowseFilter name itps01|itps06|cfelps7|cfelps8 (these printers)


The usual REGEX rules apply; ALL filters are processed, so in the example above, only the printers ‘itps01’ and ‘itps06’ would be visible!


Adding DESY printers via the “Add printer” menu

The built-in, dialogue-driven tools in Linux can be used to control DESY printers with a local driver. To do this, use the printer URI and select the desired model under “Driver” or specify a PPD. 

IMPORTANT: The printer configured in this way must have a different name to the centrally configured queue to avoid name conflicts – for example, “itps01.local” instead of “itps01”.

Common RICOH PPDs are available here: https://www.openprinting.org/download/PPD/Ricoh/PS/ (the use of PPD files has been deprecated by the CUPS developers and will likely be discontinued at a later date)