Mac OS X in a Nutshell

Configuring CUPS

CUPS, an open source project initiated and headed by Easy Software Products, was adopted by Apple as Mac OS X’s internal printing system starting with OS Version 10.2.0.

For decades, the majority of Unix systems (including earlier versions of Mac OS X) have used a patchwork of different vendors’ printing systems, usually a mix of Berkeley Unix’s LPD/LPR and System V’s LP, which trace their roots back to the 1970s. As its name suggests, CUPS provides a printing system intended to work on any Unix-based system. It uses more recent technologies, particularly the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP), which layers printing-specific commands onto HTTP.^[10] This allows, among other things, a CUPS-based print server to use HTTP-style authentication and access control, and to accept web client connections (as covered earlier in Section 8.5.1).

Sharing Through cupsd.conf

For more sophisticated control and greater security over your computer’s role as a network-accessible print server, use a text editor (such as TextEdit, Emacs, or vi) to manually modify the CUPS server’s configuration file, found at /etc/cups/cupsd.conf.

This file purposefully looks and works like Apache’s configuration file (described in Chapter 13). Just like etc/httpd/httpd.conf, /etc/cups/cupsd.confd works simply by listing many key-value pairs of server directives, either standing alone (where they affect the whole server) or enclosed in XML-like block tags (where they affect a limited scope or location). ...