Sharing a Printer Under Fedora Core

When you set up a printer using the Printer Configuration window, by default only people with accounts on the local computer can print to it. To share the printer with other users and computer on your network from CUPS, you must identify which computers, interfaces, or networks you will allow to print on your printer. Here's how:

In the Printer Configuration window, click on the printer you want to share.
Select Action⇨Sharing. The Sharing properties window appears.
On the Queue tab, click This Queue Is Available to Other Computers. This allows access to the printer by all hosts that try to print to it (hence, the All Hosts entry that appears in the Allowed Hosts box).
Select All Hosts and click Edit. The Edit Allowed Hosts window that appears lets you leave All Hosts selected, or choose to limit the hosts that can have access to the printer.
Click Save.

You can limit the hosts that are allowed to access your shared printer in the following ways:

Network devices-Select this, then choose the network devices on your computer that outside users can use to gain access to your shared printer. The interface could be an Ethernet interface (eth0), dial-up (ppp0), or other network interface.
Network address-Identify network addresses by entering an IP address, followed by a CIDR network identifier or a netmask.
Single IP address-Enter a single IP address.

After you have identified how the printer is being shared, information about who can share the printer (along with other information about printer options) is added to the /etc/cups/ cupsd.conf file. The cupsd daemon reads this information to decide whether or not to allow access to the printer when requests come to it. The following code shows the printer access lines for a printer named HP-NS1:

   <Location /printers/HP-NS1>
   Order Deny,Allow
   AuthType None
   Allow from All
   </Location>

If there were no remote access available to the printer, the last Allow from All line would be removed.

Here are some other examples of access lines. The following example allows access from any requests that come in through the eth0 interface:

   Allow from @IF(eth0)

The next line allows access to address 10 on network number 10.0.0. using the 255.255.255.0 netmask:

   Allow from 10.0.0.10/255.255.255.255

Instead of entering 255.255.255.0, you could have entered the CIDR notation of 32 (which would immediately be translated into 255.255.255.0).