Migration of Network Printers

 

This is my first blog on a small topic but really helpful to save the time.

Lets say that you have 50 network printers connected on a particular linux server and now need to migrate all of them to the newly build server.

Do you imagine  how time consuming and hectic task is it ? ..but you can do this and consume only a single minute out of hours.

so the steps are here…

Lets say there are two servers.

server –> a.com (where all printers are already connected)

server –> b.com (where you need to configure the printers)

Moving printers from server “a” –> server “b”

Tasks on server “a”

1. Make a tar of the directory /etc/cups on the server “a” on which printers are already configured
tar –cvf  cups.tar /etc/cups

2. Export the printer conf file (used by printconf-tui) on server “a”
      /usr/sbin/printconf-tui –Xexport > settings.xml

3. copy the tar to the server “b”
scp cups.tar  root@b.com:/tmp

4. Copy the above settings.xml to new server
   scp settings.xml root@b.com:/tmp

Setting on server “b”

1. As a precaution take the backup of cups dir on the new dir and untar the tar file copied.
    # mv /etc/cups /etc/cups.backup
    # cd /etc/
    # tar -cvf /tmp/cups.tar

2. Import the settings
       /usr/sbin/printconf-tui –Ximport < /tmp/settings.xml

2.1 If you have already configures some printers on the new server and need to merge the configuration use
        /usr/sbin/printconf-tui –Ximport –merge < settings.xml

3. Restart cups service
/etc/init.d/cups restart

4. Verify the printers

  lpstat -a

Advertisement