Wondering if there's any interest in a plugin to provide CUPS print server functionality? 

 

I've been running CUPS + AirPrint for some time but not as a plugin.  I recently reworked my own config into a plugin and in doing so I've had a stab at making a generic plugin rather than just for my own Canon printer.

 

It's about 80% of the way there.  Needs some tidying up on the GUI and probably some bugs squashing, but most importantly as I've only one printer to test with, I've really no idea if it'll scale out to be useable by others.

 

CUPS is a bit of a pain in that it's not as straightforward as installing printers and sometimes requires a bit of searching to find the appropriate printer driver (.PPD file) and also a raster filter.  These are usually provided by the printer manufacturer but unfortunately not always in a pre-compiled format.

 

However, I found using Gutenprint as the back-end seems to support quite a large number of makes and models out of the box. 

 

If anyone's interested, please drop me a PM and I'll send you a copy of the plugin as it stands so far.

 

 

Yes! Most definitely!

Getting google cloud print running would be awesome

Getting google cloud print running would be awesome

Possibly.  I remember seeing you mention the same on another print related thread here in the UnRAID forums.  Either way I suspect it'd need a functional CUPS setup which for the mo I'll be happy if I can get working via a plugin.

 

 

Cloudprint needs cups , python and pycups to run. Would probably be possible to wrap both into a single plug-in, with google cloudprint being optional.

I'm pulling in python and pycups in order to generate AirPrint services, so I'm pretty much there already.  Just need a working CUPS plugin to begin with.

If there's anything I can help with let me know, testing or otherwise. As of now I use the p910 driver, but I don't print often and only locally.

Don't need this now as my old Brother laser printer has been sitting in the closet since I graduated college but I'm sure once my girlfriend and I get a house together she'll want a printer and the AirPrint will come in handy.

If there's anything I can help with let me know, testing or otherwise. As of now I use the p910 driver, but I don't print often and only locally.

Ditto.  I have a very old HP LaserJet 5P hooked up to my Andromeda server and am using the p910nd printer driver.  Works for the basic stuff and short of not being able to print from an iDevice I could care less.

 

Hell the HP printer is a parallel printer that is converted to USB and then the USB is passed through to my unRAID VM running under ESXi... talk about some fun figuring that out and getting it working!  The hardest part was making sure to find a parallel to USB adapter that would "just work" and that i could pass through to unRAID.

If there's anything I can help with let me know, testing or otherwise. As of now I use the p910 driver, but I don't print often and only locally.

Ditto.  I have a very old HP LaserJet 5P hooked up to my Andromeda server and am using the p910nd printer driver.  Works for the basic stuff and short of not being able to print from an iDevice I could care less.

 

Hell the HP printer is a parallel printer that is converted to USB and then the USB is passed through to my unRAID VM running under ESXi... talk about some fun figuring that out and getting it working!  The hardest part was making sure to find a parallel to USB adapter that would "just work" and that i could pass through to unRAID.

 

He sent me a test package but I haven't had a chance to give it a try, ill forward you the links when I get home.

Ok, I tested this plug-in tonight. Here's the summary:

 

The plug-in installed fine after a little troubleshooting but this isn't necessarily the fault of your plug-in. You are using a newer version of openssl than I am so it was squashing/getting squashed by the other version. Once I removed my plug-in(sabnzbd is the plug-in that uses a different version) and rebooted, the plug-in installed.

 

Config page cleanup aside, the plug-in works. Installed CUPS, started and I had access to the webgui. I'd like to say I'm happily chugging along but I have come to the conclusion my printer is just NOT cut out for CUPS. The printer I was testing with(that I would use something like this with) is a cheap HP deskjet 1000 Series J110. Very basic, zero frills printer. It may just be my printer because it doesn't have a Gutenberg driver, but in order to use this I had to download the HP Linux Open source library(which by the way, doesn't come close to installing on unraid). That gave me access to the PPD I needed, but since it was a HP driver I needed the hpcups filter which is not compiled anywhere, so I had to transfer the library to a slackware VM to compile so I could get the hpcups filter. After getting this all looked well, a quick test print from telnet worked fine

lp /boot/testprint

That printed the test page fine and rather quickly. Trying to print from the network didn't work so well for me, CUPS received the print request, but stuck on processing and "sending data to printer".

 

Again, this most likely is not how it will go for most people, but I thought in interest of full disclosure I'd post how it went for me.

 

In my view, CUPS did its job, it allowed me to print, but I believe there was a breakdown with the PPD and my printer as it seemed CUPS was trying to send the document but it wasn't being received. I may try connecting my other printer to see how it works(its a wifi printer so thats why I wouldn't really have a need for it on CUPS) to see if it works any better, if so I'll see about adding google print to your plug-in as well.

 

EDIT:

Might I suggest for the config status and information png files, set the download location as the same I have set for my plug-ins. This way once they are downloaded once(for any of the plug-ins that use them) they are not downloaded again, so we don't have multiple copies of the same file on our drives.

 

Might also be beneficial(before official release) to link directly to the packages instead of dropbox(if this is possible) since dropbox can be slow for downloads and you can hit a bandwidth cap pretty quickly.

Influencer, that's an excellent bit of feedback.  Many thanks for sparing the time!  With regard to some of your points;

 

Newer openssl.  I figured this might be an issue.  My main server is running CUPS v1.4 albeit not as a plugin and that doesn't have a dependency on openssl.  For the plugin I thought I'd go as new as I could in order to support the best levels of printer functionality.  Not just the driver side, but what and how CUPS operates.  The downside being that I'd need to check with other plugins before releasing.  I'd probably clobber my own OpenSSH plugin as it stands.

 

I got the "sending data to printer" message too.  But then my Canon decided to report it needed cyan and magenta carts.  Don't get me started on ink jets.  I think back to the days when I had a HP LJ4 with jet-direct and a spare in the attic for good measure.  Why did I ever get rid of such great printers.  So I've decided to suck it up and get a fresh laser, just that I've not settled on a make/model yet and until I do, all CUPS testing has gone out of the window.  I've a feeling the message will go away if I revert to older packages.  I've a vague memory of having the same trouble when I was configuring CUPS on my main server.  I never really got to the root cause.  Just one of those times when I messed with packages until it magically worked, whereby I walked away from the config v-e-r-y softly in case I broke it.

 

Gui needs a big tidy.  I hacked the plugin together as proof of concept.

 

If the plugin proves viable, I'm tempted to make it CUPS only.  Perhaps have a companion plugin for other print services such as airprint and cloudprint.

 

Regarding your status and information png's.  I agree it's silly to duplicate.  However I'm not a fan of the current "images" dir name.  I'd prefer something more generic such as "common".

 

For packages; I'm happy linking to well known package repositories, but sometimes that's not always possible.  So I went for the easy Dropbox approach.  Far from ideal I agree and what I'd like to see is single repository for packages in use across all plugins.  It's a shame there is no central location that can be used.  I imagine it's been discussed before, but it sure would help where multiple plugins share common packages. 

 

Thanks once again for testing.  I'll continue to dabble with the plugin, but to be honest I'm not sure CUPS will ever be suitable for a one-size-fits-all approach.

It's a good start for sure, and a lot of the issues I stated are mainly a problem with the plugins being in their infancy. I'm sure in the future once they are fleshed out a bit more a lot of the issues such as squashed packages and duplicate files, or having to link to different servers for required files will be resolved.

 

Like I said, it worked, I believe my issue was the driver/filter combo. Since I couldn't install hplip directly there is probably some obscure dependency I missed transferring files over. Had my printer been included in Gutenberg I doubt I would have had as many issues.

 

As far as splitting air/google print to a separate plugin, definetly possible. Just have it check if cups is installed prior to enabling.

is this plugin still being developed? I am very interested in using it

is this plugin still being developed? I am very interested in using it

I put it on hold mainly as at the time my printer had died and I didn't have anything else to test it against.  I've since replaced the printer and whilst I did get it printing with CUPS under unRAID, I never revisited the plugin side of things.  In the end I used a spare Raspberry Pi as a CUPS server.  I'm not sure CUPS is best suited as a plugin as there are simply too many factors involved in getting the correct drivers functioning.  That said, let me know what make / model printer you have and perhaps I'll take a look at tailoring something that'll work for your config.

 

 

Regards,

overbyrn

Anybody else willing to do an unRAID 6 64bit plugin for CUPS?  (I would like to use an old HP Laserjet 1015 printer on my unRAID box.

 

Thanks!