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Raspberry Pi as print server without server side driver

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I bought myself a Raspberry Pi and I am using it as print server right now. It required some hacking to make it work, so I might as well blog about it.

I started off with the Arch based image from the official download page. Arch Linux might not be the best distribution for a server, but I didn't want to use the Debian image since it had X installed. And I didn't search for other downloadable images. I guess Arch will be fine for my specific home situation.

Setting up a print server on Arch is easy enoguh:

pacman -S cups

You have to modify /etc/cups/cupsd.conf in order to make the cups web interface remote accessible. This is what I changed:

  • Replaced Listen localhost:631 by Port 631.

  • Added Allow from 192.168.0.0/255.255.0.0 in the /, /admin and /admin/conf locations. (You will have to adapt the network ranges to your own situation.)

To make cups start at boot time, you have to add @cupsd to the DAEMONS line in /etc/rc.conf. (To start the cups daemon right now, issue /etc/rc.d/cupsd start.)

Using the web interface, in my case https://192.168.3.200:631 (replace the IP address as appropriate) I could add my printer. But, a problem: it uses the foo2zjs driver, which has no ARM version, so it could not be installed on the ARM-based Raspberry Pi. We can work around this, by defining the printer driver client side. This implies of course that it will be impossible to send print jobs originating from the Raspberry Pi itself. Printing a test page from the CUPS management web interface will not work either. But since print jobs typically come from client computers, this won't be an issue.

Because there is no driver available for the server, I just set up the printer to use no driver (selecting RAW as model in the CUPS printer configuration page). This is sufficient to make Windows clients work, provided that you selected the appropriate driver client side.

(Note: you don't have to install samba on your print server to use your printer from Windows. To define the printer on a Windows client, just use the url http://192.168.3.3:631/printers/myprinter.)

I would have thought that the same would work with Linux: I tried to use CUPS to connect to the printer on the server, using a locally installed driver. It didn't work.

I hacked around the problem by emulating a HP-jetdirect printer. For this I installed xinetd on the Raspberry Pi (pacman -S xinetd), and created a file /etc/xinetd.d/hp-pdl-datastr with the following content:

service hp-pdl-datastr
{
socket_type = stream
protocol = tcp
wait = no
user = root
server = /usr/bin/lp
server_args = -d myprinter -o raw
groups = yes
disable = no
}

(the name hp-pdl-datastr is just a guess. I grepped port 9100 in /etc/services, and I found hp-pdl-datastr and pdl-datastream. I just took hp-pdl-datastream because I have a HP printer, but I guess it doesn't really matter.)

When you now start the xinetd service:

/etc/rc.d/xinetd start

you can tell your Linux client that you have a HP-JetDirect printer on port 9100 of your print server. (Remember to adapt /etc/rc.conf to make xinetd start at boot time.)

References:

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