Printing from Linux-Notebooks

Pre-condition

To access our printers you have to be connected by cable to the outlets with the blue dots or by VPN.

Access from Wifi is only possible with a VPN Connection.

The following is also valid for any other Linux machine connected to the blue outlets, e.g. self managed desktop computers.

Background

Because our print server has connections in two networks to serve broadcasts in these two networks, there are some routing glitches, when talking to the print server. The primary name of the server is "print-itp", which resolves to the IP address 141.2.247.27. To be able to broadcast packages to the laptop network, there is second address 10.63.255.9, which has the name "print-itp-63". This is the one you want to talk to.

Scenarios

Self managed desktops

This is a simple and but the most radical way to connect to the printer. This will bypass your local cups server on the notebook and let your applications talk directly with the ITP print server.

You can change this system wide or only for the current user. System wide settings go to the file /etc/cups/client.conf. Personal changes go to ~/.cups/client.conf.

In most cases this file needs to be created. The man page tells you that this is deprecated. Currently this is only valid for MacOS and runs fine with Ubuntu 18.04. Add the following content:

 ServerName print-itp:631

With this setting, you will not be able to print to somewhere else.