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CUPS Administrative Guide

By : Ankur Shah
Book Image

CUPS Administrative Guide

By: Ankur Shah

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CUPS Administrative Guide
Ankur Shah
Sep, 2008 | 248 pages
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Table of Contents (16 chapters)
CUPS Administrative Guide
CUPS Administrative Guide
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
Acknowledgement
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewer
About the Reviewer
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Introduction
Introduction
Overview of the CUPS Features
History of Printing in UNIX
Printing with Personal Computers
Evolution of CUPS as a Printing System
CUPS Features
Summary
2
Building and Installing CUPS
Building and Installing CUPS
Downloading Source Code
Installing the Software
Installing a Binary Distribution
Installing CUPS Using the Package Manager on Linux
Testing CUPS
Summary
3
Printer Management
Printer Management
Printer Drivers
Managing Printer through the Command Line
Managing Print Jobs through Command Line
Managing Printers using the CUPS Web Interface
Summary
4
Managing Multiple Printers at a Time
Managing Multiple Printers at a Time
Configuring Printer Classes
Managing Printer Classes Through Command-Line
Managing Printer Classes Through CUPS Web Interface
Summary
5
CUPS Server Management
CUPS Server Management
System Requirement
Configuration Files
Classes Directives
Client Directives
Server Directives
Important Directives of cupsd.conf
Printer Directives
Concept of Operation Policies
Summary
6
Client Setup
Client Setup
Setting up a CUPS Client
Summary
7
Quota Management
Quota Management
Setting up Quota in CUPS
Correct and Incorrect Accounting
Overview of the page_log file
Flaws of the CUPS Quota system
Other Accounting Tools
Summary
8
Monitoring CUPS
Monitoring CUPS
Using the lpstat Command
Overview of the access_log File
Overview of the error_log File
Overview of snmp.conf
How SNMP Behaves in the CUPS Web Interface
Overview of mailto.conf
Monitoring SNMP Printers
Summary
9
File Typing and Filtering
File Typing and Filtering
Architecture—CUPS Filtering System
An Overview of the mime.types file
An Overview of the mime.convs file
Adding Filetypes and Filters
Overview of Filter in CUPS
Summary
10
Security
Security
Encryption Support in CUPS
Access Control
Authentication Support
Summary

Authentication Support

CUPS provides support for the both "password" and "certificate" types of authentication methods. These authentications provide ways to limit access to individuals or groups.

Authentication using Password

There are three types of password authentication, and they are:

  • Basic

  • Digest

  • Kerberos

Let's discuss them one by one.

Basic Authentication

In basic authentication, the UNIX system's usernames and passwords are used to authenticate access to resources such as printers and classes, and to limit access to the administrative functions.

The username and password are encoded in Base64. This information is passed in plain text format from the client to the server, and hence it does not offer any protection from eavesdropping. Since in this authentication method CUPS uses the usernames and passwords of the system (UNIX/Linux or any other OS in which CUPS is configured), if any malicious user monitors network packets and discovers valid users and passwords, it could result in a serious...

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