Re: printer recommendations

[Ken Hornstein <kenh%cmf.nrl.navy.mil@localhost>]

>CUPS provided its own web server on a special port; you just use a
>browser (it worked with lynx last time I tried).  If you don't want to
>use a browser, you can configure it by editing text files.

I knew that, but a web server seemed kinda heavyweight to me.  But they're
putting web servers in everything nowadays, so maybe that's just me being
silly.

My one concern with CUPS was that my printer box is also my internet gateway
box and I didn't want a web server exposed to the Internet, but I see that
CUPS can bind to a particular interface so that's not an issue (I could
filter it, I know, but my head hurts everytime I try to wade through
understanding the filter rulesets).

>The issue for me is that I mostly need to use other people's printers,
>with no influence on their prior choice, and often with little more
>information about its innards than the model name on the front panel.
>Oh, and usually with no time to figure out these details on the fly.

Ah, my usage model here is that I have a few printers at home, and I want
everything to "just work", but I can accept a reasonable amount of fiddling
to set it up.  But I've fiddled with LPRng way more than I feel I should
have to.  It sounds like CUPS will let me do what I want.

Since some people have asked me about my issues with the 2605DN, here they
are:

- Printing with LPRng to port 9100 was unreliable ... it would work okay
  for a while, but at times it would stop working (okay, probably an
  LPRng problem ... but the same setup worked with my HP JetDirect box
  for my old HP LJ4MP fine).  Power cycling the printer fixed it.  I spent
  a fair amount of time trying to track this down, but I never resolved
  the issue.

- Printing to the LPR interface on the printer works fine (although there was
  basically no documentation about this from HP ... it seems that the queue
  name is completely ignored).  However, when you print plain text to the
  printer via the LPR interface, the printer goes into "manual feed" mode,
  for reasons I cannot figure out.  This does not happen when printing to
  port 9100.

- I have a small perl script I use for printing envelopes (it prints the
  USPS "Postnet" barcode on the envelope as well).  If I use it to print
  an envelope of a certain size, the printer crashes ... by that, I mean
  that the printer displays "Internal error" on the front panel and does
  a complete reboot.  100% reproducable.  Clearly this is something to
  do with the PostScript interpreter, but I am reasonably sure my PostScript
  is correct (and even if it isn't, crashing due to bad PostScript is Not
  Cool).

There are other minor annoyances that I remember, but I don't recall what
they all are right now.

Thanks again for all of the suggestions!

--Ken