Printer Pooling

locovaca · n00b Joined: 22 Jul 2002 Posts: 29 Location: Raleigh, NC

Is there a way to pool printers under Linux? CUPS doesn't seem to talk about this, so I'm guessing no, but here's my situation:

I have two printers, a HP 932 and 952 (same printer, one just prints a bit faster than the other and they use the same driver), and I would like to have it set up so that if one is busy it sends the job to the other printer. I'm sure if I was really talented and had the free time I could write some kind of script for this, but I'd be curious to use CUPS for it if it's possible. Does anyone have any experience or ideas about this?

Thanks in advance!

quattro · Posted: Mon Jun 23, 2003 6:10 am Post subject:

I haven't done it myself but it is possible to do this with CUPS by setting up classes. A class is a collections of printers. When a job is sent to a class, it is forwarded to the first available printer in the class. CUPS even allows you to build classes from classes.

I may be wrong but I would presume that since CUPS uses ppd's, a class could even be made up of different types of printers with different drivers.

locovaca · n00b Joined: 22 Jul 2002 Posts: 29 Location: Raleigh, NC

Thanks!