Draft and placeholder for printing roadmap notes
This page serves to collect draft printing roadmap information and anything we have that passes for a short-term strategy for central print servers, printing from Athena, and so on. I'm planning to put things here until larger strategic decisions about MIT printing and any central infrastructure supporting it are made. Until we have that, though, here are...
Oliver's notes of things to talk through at the mini printing summit on 11/24/2009
The client/service grid
The situation has become complex and nuanced enough that I think we need to walk through this, at least quickly, and consider the questions:
- Which are known to work?
- Which are known to not work? Is that okay?
- Which should be discouraged (because of effort, complexity, etc.)? Is that okay?
- Which need to be explicitly tested because answers to the above questions are not known?
- For things that used to work but won't going forward, what business need are they addressing and can it be met some other way? How difficult will the transition be for clients?
- Have we made decisions on the fly that may need to be reversed or postponed? If so, what's the impact? What's the impact of not reversing?
If nothing else this information will be needed to inform the printing wizard Heather Anne is working on.
Platform |
Standalone printers (LPR) |
LPRng service |
LPRng service (auth) |
CUPS.MIT.EDU |
PRINTERS.MIT.EDU |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Athena 9 (LPR) |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
Debathena cluster (LPR) |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
Debathena cluster (GUI) |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
Debathena workstation (LPR) |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
Debathena workstation (GUI) |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
Mac OS X (10.4) |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
Mac OS X (10.5) |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
Mac OS X (10.6) |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
Windows XP |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
Windows XP (KLPR) |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
Windows Vista/7 |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
No/Easy/Hard |
Functionality as we move into a CUPS world
Job control
- lpq, lprm, lpc, lpadmin
- web-based via cups.mit.edu
- web based via printers.mit.edu
What should our job control story be to the community? Given Oliver's new motto of "Do no worse" is there a chance we can make it at least as functional as the old model? Can we make it a little better?
Documentation
- Expensive printing documentation in the clusters (SAVE project, ~$1000 total not counting labor); is it worth re-doing this? If not, are we taking a step back or is documentation no longer necessary because (printing) life is easier?
- Web pages and stock answers: who changes what?
- Printing "portal" page at http://ist.mit.edu/services/printing
Policies
- DUPLEX on by default for new accounts
- Is it still?
- Will there be gaps?
- Is it still the right thing to do?
- DUPLEX on for cluster printers
- Can CUPS do this?
- Is it "safer" than with LPRng? (I.e. easily override-able for individual jobs?)
- Header pages off for specific
- Printers
- Jobs
- User accounts
- Can these be easily controlled under CUPS?
- Can a default be set by printer? By a user?
- Stalled job timeouts
- Can we expire stalled jobs on cluster printers? Risks? Notification needed? Reasonable timeouts? (DUSP/Architecture have some real-world user data here.)
Review 2007 SAVE student survey which contained policy questions on:
- Header pages
- DUPLEX
- Expiring stalled jobs