So have you ever used a web printer and it was great?
…
Yeah, me neither. It’s probably possible on windows, but try to add more than one OS to the network and it’s horrible. And actually printing is a major pain in Linux anyway. Theoretically ‘lp’ and the like have no problem with remote printers, but I wanted something I understood. So today I’m going to post my setup I use instead.
I have a computer physically connected to the printer. Let’s call it ‘printserver’. On that server there is a folder, /printme, which is constantly monitored by inode. Any file added to that directory is printed.
Suppose I downloaded cutecats.pdf and I want to print it. Then I run:
scp cutecats.pdf printserver:/printme
And voila, the cute cats get printed.
Here’s the setup for the server:
- Get the printer to work. This is the hard step.
- Make a directory /printme. Add any missing users, add a new group called ‘print’ and add everyone who needs to print to that, etc.
- Set up /printme to be a tmpfs with the sticky bit set. (So we don’t fill up the hard drive)
/etc/fstab tmpfs /printme tmpfs rw,nodev,nosuid,noexec,uid=nobody,gid=print,mode=1770,size=1G 0 0
- Install incron and add this to the incrontab (of user ‘print’ or ‘sudo’):
# incrontab -l /printme IN_CLOSE_WRITE,IN_MOVED_TO lp $@/$#
Note that this will preserve files after they’re printed, because my server is low-volume enough I don’t need to care.