Bdtyktl

I've had to uninstall cupsd and cups-browserd because I couldn't print to a remote printer when they were running (and gave up after 3 hours).

Printing works great now from applications, but from the CLI I have to do things like this:

enscript -p- reasons_i_love_linux.md | lpr -H server:631

I'd like to be able to just say:

enscript reasons_i_love_linux.md

like in the old days before I "upgraded" CUPS.

This turns out to be hard to find via Google...

Again, the cups daemon is not running on this machine, only on the remote printer server.

Any ideas?

You should have (at least) the "client" parts of CUPS installed. Then put this line into a file saved as /etc/cups/client.conf (for system-wide usage) or into ${HOME}/.cups/client.conf (if you want to use different remote CUPS servers for different users):

ServerName servername:631

or

ServerName server-ip-address:631

Note that /etc/cups/client.conf must be world-readable since it's user-space applications that will be reading it (not a root-owned daemon).

Should the remote CUPS server be rather new, you have to tell your print client to ask the remote server to use IPP v1.1 (not v2.0 as the newer CUPS versions do):

ServerName servername:631/version=1.1

Now your local cupsd will be by-passed (if it's running at all), or no attempt to contact it will be made (if it's not running). The printing client programs will directly talk to the remote CUPS first (not the one located on localhost:631, as they otherwise would without the presence of the client.conf entry outlined above).

To answer your question about an environment variable: Yes, there is one. It is called CUPS_SERVER. You could use it on a case-by-case base whenever you print a job if the client.conf entry is not there, or if you want to override the remote server named in client.conf, or if it listens on a non-standard port

CUPS_SERVER=other_server:666 lp -p printername jobfile

You can also use it to list the names and status of (shared) printers on a remote server:

CUPS_SERVER=other_server:666             lpstat -p

CUPS_SERVER=other_server:666/version=1.1 lpstat -p



CUPS_SERVER=other_server:666             lpstat -v

CUPS_SERVER=other_server:666/version=1.1 lpstat -v