Snow Leopard™ Server

Chapter 31. Print Services

In This Chapter

• Introduction to print services

• Planning print services

• Print services setup and configuration

• Managing and monitoring print services

Snow Leopard Server's print services allow organizations to centralize management of print jobs, including imposing print quotas for users.

Using print services requires an advanced configuration server; standard and workgroup configuration servers are limited to simple printer sharing, which works identically to the shared printers created by Mac OS X desktop users.

The advantages of setting up full print services include:

• The ability to set page quotas for specific users

• The ability to set page quotas for specific printer queues

• Centralized management of printer jobs and errors

• Reduced print job delays for network clients

• The ability to maintain logs of print use

Print services in Mac OS X Server rely on CUPS (Common Unix Printing System), an open-source project Apple adopted for use in Mac OS X Jaguar in 2002 and subsequently acquired in 2007.

CUPS remains the default printing system for most Linux distributions, and Apple continues to work with the open-source community to develop and enhance the software.

The modular CUPS package was originally designed to bridge the compatibility divide between AT&T's System V and Berkeley's BSD flavors of Unix (including Linux) to offer a unified interface and give printer makers a standard way to deliver custom printer drivers to users of Unix-like operating systems.

CUPS began using ...