Fedora contemplates the driverless printing future

Posted Jun 19, 2021 0:21 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Fedora contemplates the driverless printing future by pizza
Parent article: Fedora contemplates the driverless printing future

> > The result is that in large organizations where people can get printers in their offices when you try to print you often see endless lists of printers all with more or less the same name apart from some obscure hash and there is apparently no way to filter them out.

> This is effectively no different than before, and the solution is the same -- administrators have to pick a printer name that is unambiguous.

You're missing something ...

If a PC searches for all IPP printers it will have a large list of them. If it's configured by an administrator, it'll only have one or two.

We've got THREE printers. Yet the printer list on Windows has maybe TEN printers listed? How am I supposed to get rid of the printers I don't want to be visible? They are a real pain.

Or, in the business environment, how do you stop the CEO accidentally printing confidential documents on the post room printer (or the office boy printing his love letters on the CEO's printer :-)

Made worse by the modern Windows habit of changing the default printer to whatever you used last ... so as soon as you've lost one document, you promptly lose ALL your documents.

This is FUNDAMENTALLY different from before, when you could EASILY configure any PC to only know about one or two printers.

Cheers,
Wol

Fedora contemplates the driverless printing future

Posted Jun 19, 2021 0:58 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (2 responses)

> If a PC searches for all IPP printers it will have a large list of them. If it's configured by an administrator, it'll only have one or two.

BTW, I was referring to the "administrator" configuring the printer itself to have a non-ambiguous name instead of whatever the printer was shipped with. This is routine for any organization large enough to have more than a couple of printers.

> We've got THREE printers. Yet the printer list on Windows has maybe TEN printers listed? How am I supposed to get rid of the printers I don't want to be visible? They are a real pain.

I can't help you there, beyond stating the obvious point that for that to have happened, Windows had to have been explicitly set up that way.

> Or, in the business environment, how do you stop the CEO accidentally printing confidential documents on the post room printer (or the office boy printing his love letters on the CEO's printer :-)

Duh, the same way it's done currently -- have the administrator configure the CEO's system to only print to a specific subset of printers -- by setting up explicit printer queues and disabling auto-discovery. And/or having the C-suite computers/printers on their own private network segment, which is a good idea regardless.

> Made worse by the modern Windows habit of changing the default printer to whatever you used last ... so as soon as you've lost one document, you promptly lose ALL your documents.

That hasn't been my experience, but in the end, there's only so much one can do about systems that insist on doing the wrong thing.

> This is FUNDAMENTALLY different from before, when you could EASILY configure any PC to only know about one or two printers.

I'd disagree about the "easily" part, but literally nothing has changed on that front. One can still create local print queues pointing at whatever remote printer you want (Driverless IPP or IPP, JetDirect, Windows, CUPS, whatever) and completely disable auto-discovery. That functionality is not going away.

Fedora contemplates the driverless printing future

Posted Jun 19, 2021 1:59 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> > If a PC searches for all IPP printers it will have a large list of them. If it's configured by an administrator, it'll only have one or two.

> BTW, I was referring to the "administrator" configuring the printer itself to have a non-ambiguous name instead of whatever the printer was shipped with. This is routine for any organization large enough to have more than a couple of printers.

Yes I'm talking about a home setup, so maybe three printers is a lot, BUT. How do you set up a printer with a non-ambiguous name, other than - for every PC! - editing the queue name and swearing when Windows promptly forgets it next time it does a discovery ...

> > We've got THREE printers. Yet the printer list on Windows has maybe TEN printers listed? How am I supposed to get rid of the printers I don't want to be visible? They are a real pain.

> I can't help you there, beyond stating the obvious point that for that to have happened, Windows had to have been explicitly set up that way.

So how come I did NOT explicitly set anything up like that, yet Windows does it anyway?

My Windows settings are the DEFAULT. With the result that our main printer appears under about three different names - the one it gave itself, the one I tried to give it, and the one I explicitly edited on the PC. (At which point, the original name I edited promptly reappeared as a new printer...) Our secondary printer is just as bad. Plus all the special Windows printers half of which I'd like to delete ...

BY DEFAULT, Windows searches for AND DISPLAYS, every printer it can find. And on a halfway large network, that's likely to be A LOT.

Cheers,
Wol

Fedora contemplates the driverless printing future

Posted Jun 19, 2021 10:30 UTC (Sat) by Jonno (subscriber, #49613) [Link]

> How do you set up a printer with a non-ambiguous name, other than - for every PC! - editing the queue name and swearing when Windows promptly forgets it next time it does a discovery ...

You do the change *on the printer*, not in Windows. Some printers have a small LED screen and navigation buttons, others have a built-in web-server, others have both. Find the "Network Identification" section and change "Host Name" and "Bonjour Service Name" to whatever you want. ("Host Name" is passed to your DHCP server, which may be configured to set up a DNS record with that name in your local domain. "Bonjour Service Name" is the mDNS name the printer will advertise itself under.)

Fedora contemplates the driverless printing future

Posted Jun 19, 2021 1:58 UTC (Sat) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link]

The large lists of printers problem is caused by everyone being too helpful. The printers support multiple print and automatic discovery protocols. And the operating systems add support for more discovery protocols.

The end result can be one printer showing up anywhere from one to six times.

I remember the bad old days though, where it was sometimes a major effort to get a printer onto the network even one time. So this is a better problem in its own way.