Once the CUPS server has been configured and printers have been added and published to the network, the next step is to configure the clients, or the machines that are going to access the CUPS server. If one has a single desktop machine that is acting as both server and client, then much of this information may not be needed.
CUPS will also need to be
installed on your UNIX® clients. Once
CUPS is installed on the clients,
then CUPS printers that are shared
across the network are often automatically discovered by the
printer managers for various desktop environments such as
GNOME or
KDE. Alternatively, one can access
the local CUPS interface on the
client machine at http://localhost:631
and click on “Add Printer” in the Administration
section. When presented with the “Device”
drop-down box, simply select the networked
CUPS printer, if it was
automatically discovered, or select ipp
or
http
and enter the IPP
or HTTP URI of the
networked CUPS printer, usually in
one of the two following syntaxes:
ipp://server-name-or-ip
/printers/printername
http://server-name-or-ip
:631/printers/printername
If the CUPS clients have
difficulty finding other CUPS
printers shared across the network, sometimes it is helpful to
add or create a file
/usr/local/etc/cups/client.conf
with a
single entry as follows:
ServerName server-ip
In this case, server-ip
would
be replaced by the local IP address of the
CUPS server on the network.
Versions of Windows® prior to XP did not have the
capability to natively network with
IPP-based printers. However, Windows® XP
and later versions do have this capability. Therefore, to add
a CUPS printer in these versions of
Windows® is quite easy. Generally, the Windows®
administrator will run the Windows® Add
Printer
wizard, select Network
Printer
and then enter the URI
in the following syntax:
http://server-name-or-ip
:631/printers/printername
If one has an older version of Windows® without native IPP printing support, then the general means of connecting to a CUPS printer is to use net/samba413 and CUPS together, which is a topic outside the scope of this chapter.
All FreeBSD documents are available for download at https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/doc/
Questions that are not answered by the
documentation may be
sent to <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org>.
Send questions about this document to <freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org>.