Administering CUPS

In addition to adding printers, the CUPS web interface provides access to various other useful settings. You can administer most of the printing tasks from the Administration tab, which houses settings under various different categories. Under the Server section, for instance, you can find options to tweak the configuration of the server as well as view various types of access and error logs.

Using the ‘Manage Printers’ button under the Printer section, you can control the settings for individual printers. Every printer’s page has options rolled under two pull-down menus labelled Maintenance and Administration. From under the Maintenance menu, you can print a test page, a self-test page, clean print heads and manage print jobs.

To customise the behaviour of the printer, use the Administration menu to tweak its default options, set it as the default printer, restrict user access, modify its settings or delete it from the CUPS server altogether. Besides the Administration tab, there are a couple of other important tabs we should mention as well.

For starters, you need to switch to the Classes tab for printer class management. A class is a collection of several printers.

When you send print job to a class, CUPS automatically assigns the job to the next available printer, instead of waiting for a specific printer. Then there’s the Jobs tab, which enables you to view and manage all print jobs that are currently in the print queue.