Anyone interested in CUPS?

[Benjamin Scott]

On Tue, 4 Jan 2005, at 8:33am, elawson at laconialaw.com wrote:
> Hint:  If you are not using CUPS you should try it.  Very neat and just
> works.

/curmudgeon mode = on

  CUPS is indeed nearly magical when it works.  I love it for that.  The
problem, I've found, is that when it doesn't work, it's damn near impossible
to fix it, or indeed even to get a useful diagnostic.

  For example, a few months ago, we had a new customer with a new Linux
server.  They were deploying this alleged software which had obviously been
living in a dusty old SCO shop somewhere, and had been dragged kicking and
screaming into the Linux world.  Among the many bletcherous things this
program did was send mostly-but-not-quite plain text to print queues, based
on various assumptions about specific printer hardware.  CUPS kept trying to
"massage" this data and was totally hosing things, even when we set the
printer type to "raw" (or whatever it was) in CUPS.  Apparently, even when
conversion is disabled, some conversion still gets done.

  In the end, we ripped CUPS out and replaced it with LPRng, which, while
much less friendly and magical, does actually listen when told: "Sit down,
shut up, and do what I tell you."

  I suppose I would benefit from a meeting on CUPS.  Maybe I'll learn how to 
debug it.  :-)

-- 
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
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