Duplicating CUPS configurations

Problem

Our old way of duplicating printer setups from system to system using printconf-tui is depreciated because printconf-tui is no longer included.

Solution

Link below says:

If this is the task you want to perform, the first question I want to ask you is if you are sure.

It is.

You might find that CUPS browsing lets you achieve the same thing more dynamically.

Possibly, but not the issue. Our users don't browse, they use the lp interface. Yes we're stuck in the 1990s but that is the way our flow works. I want to have users continue to work they way they always have, not stop and train them on something New! Shiny! just because we're going to a new OS rev which has enough of this kind of crap already.

However, if you really want to copy all of the queues to another RHEL-5 machine, copy these: /etc/cups/ppd/*.ppd /etc/cups/printers.conf /etc/cups/classes.conf — and optionally /etc/cups/cupsd.conf for the server settings (e.g. whether to publish shared queues). Make sure you set their SELinux file contexts correctly on the target machine. Just use /sbin/restorecon -vR /etc/cups.

That all boils down to running this on the source system:

# tar cfp cups.tar /etc/cups/ppd/*.pdd /etc/cups/printers.conf /etc/cups/classes.conf /etc/cups/cupsd.conf

...followed by the appropriate tar xfp on the destination system.

It also works when you are bringing configuration files forward from CentOS 4 (which is actually what we are doing, trying to configure a CentOS-5 system with mechanisms which worked in CentOS-4).

Discussion

New! Shiny!

So in conclusion: because some developer can't conceive of someone wanting work in a different way than he does, they've removed a perfectly good, portable (well for xml values of "portable") configuration synchronizer. So instead, we get to copy raw configuration files across, a scheme which will backfire messily the next time the format of those configuration files is changed. Brilliant.