bonjour vs ip printing

Question

bonjour vs ip printing

I am a Windoze network admin at a school. We recently added three Macs. I connected them directly to two printers in the lab via the IP address of the printers.

1. What is the difference between using IP pirning and Bonjour?

2. I see that when I set up the printer under the admin account, it shows up for all users. Is there a way to script printer use per user name or per computer name?

Thanks,

Windows XP Pro

Posted on Mar 14, 2009 7:16 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

PAHU

Level 6

16,705 points

Mar 15, 2009 2:09 PM in response to JeremySchubert

Hi there,

In reply to your questions;

1. The three IP protocols provided are LPD, HP Jetdirect-Socket (aka RAW Port 9100) and IPP. All of these protocols require you to know the IP address or DNS name of the printer - there is no broadcasting of the printers existence on the network. Bonjour, on the other hand, uses multicasting to advertise itself on the network so that a user doesn't have to manually enter values.

I have seen no official documentation that quotes one as being better than the other. For my network, I prefer to have the Mac's printing via IP rather than using Bonjour, as I feel IP can handle the larger spool files that our users generate (IDCS3, IDPS3, etc).

2. When you add a printer it will be available to all users, just like applications. If you want to control what a user has access to, you may have to look at using Parental Controls on each Mac. This is located in System Preferences and lets the administrator restrict what applications and system settings, including the printers, a managed user (client) has access to.

This is of course a GUI way on controlling. Maybe someone else can reply with a script method of controlling the access.

PaHu

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Answer 2

rbii

Level 2

345 points

Mar 15, 2009 3:31 PM in response to JeremySchubert

Bonjour is just a way for printer's to advertise their ip addresses and other relavent information. The Bonjour protocol is not used to actually print but rather to save you the trouble of manually entering IP information when setting up a printer on your Mac.

When a printer is added using the Bonjour discovery protocol then the printer provides the Mac with a list of supported printer protocols ordered by the printer's preference. For example, a particular printer that works better via the Socket protocol might advertise that as preferred to another IP printing protocol.

So adding a printer via Bonjour is easier than manually entering the IP information and it will generally chose the IP printing protocol that works best with that printer (Socket, LPD, or IPP).

I hope this helps.

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Answer 3

Barney-15E

Level 10

112,366 points

Mar 15, 2009 3:37 PM in response to JeremySchubert

2. You might look into the controls that CUPS provides. You can access the CUPS interface through a web browser: http://localhost:631. You can find the documentation there, also.

I also just wondered if the OS overrides the CUPS permissions. I don't know about that at all.

Message was edited by: Barney-15E

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