HP Deskjet F4480 - Cups, Saned, and Samba oh my!


Part #1 Cups install/configuration

So, my old HP Deskjet all-in-one finally gave up the ghost earlier this year. Something to do with the Printer Cartridges and error’s all over the place. Well, as a family of 4 1/2(does the dog count as a half?) we really needed a new printer/scanner/copier combo, but I just couldn't justify the $100+ for a networked all-in-one with limited functionality. So alas! out comes the penguin in me. We bought a HP Deskjet F4480 All-In-One from walmart last weekend, and I set out to network share the device.

Here were my goals:
* Get Cups to share the printer to all the machines in the house
*Enable remote administration of CUPS so that I wouldn’t have to VNC to the server and administer everything
*Get the Scanner to work with saned and sanetwain (window’s Xsane equivalent) so that we can scan from the windows machine’s, along with the linux machines.
*Auto-push window’s print drivers to window’s machines so I’m not hunting down the silly CD every time I need to add a printer for guests that come in and want to print
*Secure things down so only our local subnet can print/scan/take over the world.
* Do all of this from a headless virtualbox interface

Did I accomplish my goals? yup, all but the last one. Everything worked splendid in Virtualbox during my testing phases (I test all of my new home ‘servers’ in virtualbox before pushing them out). But when I pushed it prod to my little server (AMD 1.2Ghz w/ only 1GB ram, 40GB hd, I’m a cheap bastard), my little server couldn’t keep up with all of the USB emulation between the device, server and virtualbox..CPU was at 90%+ and memory went through the roof when attempting to print. So I took it out of virtualbox until I can scrounge up enough dough to buy a decent server. (This server hosts: pop3, cups, gallery2 (our family photo gallery), vpn, nagios, and other such services through VirtualBox...so I REALLY need an upgrade at some point).

I’ll post how I did all of this, from memory (although I might miss a dependency or two).

Step 1: Download files and install services

I did all of this from my Ubuntu 10.04LTS server, so mileage may vary. First, I went to HP’s opensource website: http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/index.html and downloaded the .deb package (newer than what Ubuntu has in it’s repo, and fixes issues with the scanner btw). Then off to cups.org to download windows driver support (http://www.cups.org/software.php). Now time for packages and dependencies!

Checking my list of installed packages, I must assume that I installed the following (and dependencies of course):

DO FIRST: dpkg -i yourhplip-package.dpkg and install it’s called for dependencies!

CUPS: cups, cups-bsd, cups-client, cups-common, cups-pdf, cups-ppdc (for ppd manipulation), ghostscript-cups, hal-cups-utils, libcups2, libcups2-dev, libgnomecups1.0-1

SANE: sane, libsane, libsane-dev, sane-utils, xsane, xsane-common

SAMBA: samba, samba-common, samba-common-bin, system-config-samba (gui, came default for some reason)

Okay, so once the packages were installed, I set out to get cups installed and configured so that I could at least print over the network.

I’m not going to go into detail about each configuration change and what I did (although I’ll add some comments here and there in the configuration). So here is what my /etc/cups/cupsd.conf looks like (make sure you backup your config before making changes). Keep in mind, the policies were created by ubuntu when I installed the package, for now I left them alone until I can create my own policies, but it works so I’m not complaining right now.

## Go here for my cupds.conf. It appears blogger seems to think my configuration is in html and attempts to format it, oi.

http://pastebin.ca/1944437

Okay, save config and restart cups! /etc/init.d/cups restart (or if your using upstart.. restart cups).

Since I’m a CLI lover, all of this was done from an ssh session, once cups is restarted, you should be able to navigate to the cups page from anyone in (in this example 192.168.1.*) subnet. Fire up firefox (you ARE using firefox, right?) and navigate to: https://your.cups.ip:631 I say https, because by default cups wants https authentication, and you might as well get into the habit of using https for security purposes.

I hope you followed the first instruction to install the hplip driver before you started installing/configuring cups..if not, you should be able to install the .deb package for hplip before configuring your printer. Restart cups after installing hplip just in case.

Now, it’s time to install the printer! Administration - > Printers -> Add Printer ->Local Printer
In my case, it shows up as: HP Deskjet F4400 series (HP Deskjet F4400 series). Select it and click next. Give it a name, description, location and click ‘share printer’, click continue. Select your driver, if it’s not listed..search your server for the *.ppd file for your printer (this is what I had to do for the hp4480), unzip the ppd file, and copy it over to the machine that you are browsing cups from, then add the .ppd file). Once this is done, click ‘Add Printer’.

Tada! Now you have a shared network printer with cups.

From a linux client, you can add the printer via the ipp address (In cups, click ‘printers’ and click the printer..up in the address bar, copy the url, and paste for ipp printing). For windows client’s, if you have ipp setup in windows (more on that in part 2/3) you can do the following (example is with Windows 7)
Start -> Devices and Printers -> Add Printer -> Add network printer ->The Printer I want isn’t listed -> Select a shared printer by name ->Copy/Paste the URL as above into this and click next.

For some people this may work (surf the net for ‘IPP printing in Windows 7’ to find out how you enable ipp printing in windows 7...can’t remember this off the top of my head). For me, and for whatever reason this didn’t work very well. So I opted to use samba in order to push windows drivers out to my connected clients. More on this in the next part.

Part 2 will cover Samba/Sane configurations with Cups for sharing your scanner and pushing out windows drivers.