Printing at CERN

For many years CERN had a very sophisticated print server infrastructure which supported several different protocols (AppleTalk, IPX and TCP/IP) and many different printing standards. Today’s situation differs a lot: we have a much more homogenous network infrastructure, where TCP/IP is used everywhere and we have less printer models, which almost all work using current standards (i.e. they all provide PostScript drivers). This change gave us the possibility to review the printing architecture aiming at simplifying the infrastructure in order to achieve full automation of the service. The new infrastructure offers both: LPD service exposing print queues to Linux and Mac OS X computers and native printing for Windows based clients. The printer driver distribution is automatic and native on Windows and automated by custom mechanisms on Linux, where the appropriate Foomatic drivers are configured. Also the process of printer registration and queue creation is completely automated following the printer registration in the network database. At the end of 2006 we have moved all (~1200) CERN printers and all users' connections at CERN to the new service. This paper will describe the new architecture and summarize the process of migration.