Mac OS X Panther in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Alternative Printer Interfaces

The Printer Setup Utility is Apple’s fully Aqua-integrated print management application, but it’s really just one possible frontend to Mac OS X’s printing system. CUPS (and therefore Mac OS X) ships with several command-line programs for creating and tracking print jobs, as well as administrating the machine’s print server. You can also access the CUPS server through a web browser to track jobs and perform administrative tasks.

Web-Based Print Administration

Because CUPS uses the IPP protocol—an extension of HTTP— it’s quite capable of handling ordinary HTTP requests from a web browser. Load http://localhost:631 in a browser to see your print server’s web interface (regardless of your Personal Web Sharing setting). Depending on how permissive you’ve set CUPS to be (see Section 9.10.1 later in this chapter) you may also be able to connect to your machine’s CUPS web interface remotely, over the local network, or even the Internet. By default, if Printer Sharing is activated (see Section 9.9.1), then any machine that can see your Mac’s IP address can also connect to its CUPS server.

The web interface’s main page features the following subpages:^[12]

Do Administration Tasks

Provides some simple interfaces for modifying the printer list, managing pending print jobs, and setting up classes.

This is the one part of the site that has any access control set on it by default, allowing connections only from IP 127.0.0.1 (the local machine). See Section 9.10.1 for ...