CentOS 7.x Setup papercut on top of cups

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To setup papercut on top of cups for authentication or at least for keepting track of pages printed by various users use following steps:

1. Go to https://www.papercut.com/products/ng/download/ and download Linux version of papercut
2. Create a local user for installing paper cut.

   useradd papercut
   passwd papercut

3. Relax papercut user nofile limits by editing '/etc/security/limits.conf' and appending

   papercut - nofile 65535

4. Login as papercut and install downloaded software

   su - papercut
   chmod +x pcng-setup-<ver>-linux-x64.sh
   ./pcng-setup-<ver>-linux-x64.sh

   Replace 'pcng-setup-<ver>-linux-x64.sh' with name of setup file downloaded eg 'pcng-setup-18.3.5.48033-linux-x64.sh'

   Install by accepting EULA, agreeing to install, give desired root password

5. After installation access admin page at http://<fqdn>:9191/admin
6. Admin page at http://<fqdn>:9191/admin will allow
   • Creation of admin user account with password for papercut administration
   • Selecting type of organization such as college, school for use of papercut
   • Set default printing costs for grayscale and colored prints
   • Configure initial user credit
   • User/group synchronization from sources such as local unix pam or LDAP or Google Cloud directory
   • Import users

   Some of these are described at https://www.papercut.com/support/resources/manuals/ng-mf/common/topics/install-linux.html for reference

Note that as such papercut comes with end user client which is available on the machine where papercut is installed inside /home/papercut sub-folders. However instead of going for papercut end user client, enable web print for all printers. This way users can simply open http://&lt;print-server&gt;:9191/ URL and login with username:password. After login users can use web print to print pdf files. Note that printing of non-pdf files is not supported for Linux based setups.

Thus, users can print without any client or printer setup by simply using the browser. The only limitation is that users should convert the file to pdf format before it can be printed in this manner via Linux based papercut servers.

Issue faced while using papercut Linux graphical client

This is also done as during basic testing it was observed that papercut client was ignoring the authentication information (username:password) given for connecting to papercut server for identifying user. It was always using local user who is running papercut-client for printing accounting purposes. This is an issue in case user has root access to the machine. Then they can create any user account (eg user1, user2, etc.) and then connecting to papercut server to print as user1, user2 while authenticating as themselves without knowing user1, or user2 passwords.

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