On Fri, 16 Mar 2001, Paul Lussier wrote:
> >Kickstart is widely used at Cisco -- most all of the print servers are
> >installed with it, and I believe the Linux desktop rollout now uses it, as
> >well, though I left before that got finalized. So *some* large
> >corporations really are Linux friendly! (We just gotta work on the
> >others, now...)
>
> I'm curious how much the people responsible for this deployment had
> to hack and patch KickStart. I wonder how many of their fixes were
> rolled back into the source at RH.
To the best of my knowledge, they didn't have to tweak it at all for the
print server rollout... feel free to poke around, though -- it's at
Sourceforge: http://ceps.sourceforge.net/index.shtml Note, however, that
the documentation is described thusly:
"Documentation -- well - err -- um?"
-- Damian Ivereigh
(Damian is the "printing god" at Cisco (currently in Australia), though
Ben Woodard is the primary non-Cisco developer; he's over at VA, but was
formerly Damian's US counterpart for printing.)
CEPS is an amazing print solution that rocks... though I only recommend it
for the strong-of-heart, verging on maniacal. The learning curve for
administrators is non-trivial, but, once in place, is about as solid as
any enterprise print system I've ever worked with. And there's even some
pretty spiffy fax server functionality added in, as well. So, if you've
got a bazillion users that need to print (Cisco had roughly 35K or so when
I left), from multiple platforms, to multiple printers, have at. And for
Unix boxen, it's positively amazing, as you don't need to install
printers: the client will gladly accept, say, "lpr -P mycoolqueuenamehere"
and, if that queue exists, will send it on its way, even if the associated
print server is a dozen hops away on your WAN. (The print servers
propagate printer ownership info among themselves, so they always know
which queue belongs to which server.) So, no tweaking /etc/printcap, no
messing with printtool, etc., etc., etc.; the client Just Works. (Oh --
when I say "client," I really mean "tweaked lpr"; this lpr replaces the
stock printing functionality of the Unix in question, including SysV
Unices' lp.)
Wow. I'll stop yappin' now. CEPS: good stuff. Hard stuff. Redundant
stuff. Better than anything else I've ever seen for fault-tolerant
WAN/LAN enterprise print solutions.
-Ken
> Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying or implying that Cisco wouldn't
> have kicked back changes. I'm just wondering how much they had to
> fix/customize to actually get it to work the way they wanted, and
> whether or not those changes were rolled back in.
>
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