The instructions on the department website provide a good documentation of the current department printing system. As for printing from unsupported machines (which is of interest here), http://www.cs.umd.edu/faq/cups.html describes three possible approaches. Here I focus on using the following method as a basis.
Add Printer under the Printers folder in the Control Panels. Select Network Printer and then select "Connect to a printer on the Internet or on your Intranet" where you can put in: http://printer.cs.umd.edu/printers/(printer)
Of course this method only works with VPN when connecting from outside or from wireless network, and this is where SSH comes in. Actually this is very easy. All you have to do is to create a SSH connection which forwards an access to printer.cs.umd.edu:80 via a department unix host.
1. Begin port forwarding using the following command (more about SSH: here)
$ ssh -L xxxx:printer.cs.umd.edu.edu:80 (your username)@(dept unix hostname)
where xxxx is an arbitrary port number used for forwarding. Large random number (such as 20080, 31294, etc) is recommended. Keep this SSH session during the installation process.
2. Add Printer under the Printers folder in the Control Panels. Select Network Printer and then select "Connect to a printer on the Internet or on your Intranet". This time you put in:
http://127.0.0.1:xxxx/printers/(printer)
(xxxx must be the same port number you used in the previous step.)
3. Then follow the rest of the installation process. In my case, I could add ps4a and ps4b, but I couldn't add ps4 because of "driver not found" error.
4. Once the installation is completed, you can close the current SSH connection if necessary. When you print to a department printer, you need to connect using the same command you used in step 1 before sending a job to the printer.
Last Updated $Date: 2004/02/13 05:39:07 $ GMT