Printing

General information
- Printers
- Instructions / Troubleshooting
Printing from a workstation
- Graphical user interface
- Command Line utilities
Printing from your personal notebook or computer

General information

The printer system at the ITP is based on CUPS, the Common Unix Printing System. A detailed description can be found in the online Users Manual.

Printers

The following printers are accessible from the main corridors

printer	Type	room	notes
p1	Toshiba eSTUDIO3540C	205	main printer
p2	HP 8150	305
p3	HP Farb-Laser	305	color
p4	OKI Farb-Laser	205	color
p5	Dell C3765dnf	105	color / scanner
p6	Dell C3765dnf	305	color / scanner

For colored printing chose the printers with the "c" prefix. I.e. chosing c1 will print on the same physical printer as p1, but in color.

Instructions / Troubleshooting

Printing from a workstation
Printing from your personal notebook or computer

Printing from a workstation

Graphical user interface

For many file types the document viewer okular can be used to print as well.

Command Line utilities

The standard BSD printer commands lpr, lpstat, etc are accessible, too.

lpstat -p shows the list of known printers.
lpstat -d shows the default printer.
lpr file_to_print.ps prints file_to_print.ps to the default printer.
lpr -Pp5 file_to_print.ps prints file_to_print.ps to p5 (room 2L07).

Printing from your personal notebook or computer

There are several possibilities to print files on the printers in the ITP.

Windows

Add new printer
choose "Network printer"
enter the printer url (replace p1 for the printer to be used):

http://service.physik.uni-leipzig.de:631/printers/p1

if windows is unable to resolve this printer url, try the following printer url

http://139.18.9.8:631/printers/p1

choose the appropriate printer driver (refer to printer table)

Copying to a workstation

The naive way is to copy your file to a workstation in the ITP network using scp (or similar tools like WinSCP for Windows):

scp file_to_print.ps yourname@yourworkstation.physik.uni-leipzig.de:~
ssh yourname@yourworkstation.physik.uni-leipzig.de

and proceed using the methods described above (ie. kprinter or lpr, …).

If you are familiar using commandline tools lpr, this procedure can be shortened by the following command:

cat file_to_print.ps | ssh yourname@yourworkstation.physik.uni-leipzig.de lpr -P p5

which prints your local file file_to_print.ps on ITP's printer p5.

Using your own CUPS server

If you primarily work on your personal machine and print very often to the printers at the ITP, it may be feasible to install CUPS on your computer and configure it to properly forward your documents into the network of the ITP. The installation can not be covered here, please see the documentation of the CUPS homepage or refer to the manual of your operating system/distribution.

Your computer is in the ITP network

Configure CUPS to show network printers. Programs that use CUPS will then show the printers on your personal machine. You can, for example, use the BSD command line tools described above.

note: the university wireless network is not inside the ITP network

Your computer is outside the ITP network

You can use CUPS to access a network printer. However, we don't want to grant access to our printers to everyone on the web, therefore you will need create a ssh-tunnel to ITP's CUPS server and use port forwarding. In the following example we will reroute port 8026 to the CUPS server in the ITP:

ssh -L localhost:8026:localhost:631 yourname@yourworkstation.physik.uni-leipzig.de

Now CUPS can print over the specified port, however the printers have to be added to your CUPS server locally. The following part describes the configuration settings for our printer p5 as an example. The other printers can be added analogously. Add a network printer to your (local) CUPS server:

type of the printer: Internet Printing Protocol (http)
connection: http://localhost:8026/printer/p5
name, description and location are your choice completely
driver: Generic postscript printer (en) or the HP printer driver if you have them (for p5 this would be HP LaserJet Series PCL 6 CUPS

If you don't want to remember the command to create a ssh-tunnel, you may consider to add the following section to your .ssh/config file:

Host *.physik.uni-leipzig.*
    User            username
    CheckHostIP     yes
    LocalForward    localhost:8026 localhost:631

that automatically creates the tunnel whenever you connect via ssh to the ITP network, eg. with the command

ssh yourname@yourworkstation.physik.uni-leipzig.de