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Imprints (Installation Manager of Printer driver
Retreival and Installation for Samba) is a project to
implement a UNIX equivalent of the Windows NT APW.
It has been taken on in part by the Samba Team, VA Linux
Systems and Hewlett-Packard. The Imprints toolset seeks
to provide central repository for users and administrators
to locate, download, and install all variations Window
95/98/NT printer drivers on Samba print servers.
The server portion of Imprints is composed of a database
server which contains information and locations of various
printer driver packages. This server can be queried over
standard HTTP get requests and should therefore be available
to most administrators behind firewalls. The server's
database consists of records containing data about each
known printer driver package. For example, each driver
record contains a URL from which the Imprints installation
client can download the package as well as a public key which
can be used to verify the package's integrity.
Once downloaded, the installation client will attempt to
install the printer driver on the defined remote server
using the username and password provided by the administrator.
If the username/password pair can be authenticated by the
remote server (and has the appropriate authorization), then
the printer driver(s) is (are) installed and the new Printer
is created.
From Samba's point of view, the process of creating a new
printer via the Imprints installation client is identical to
that of using the Windows NT APW. In fact, Imprints utilizes
Samba's rpcclient and smbclient tools to issue the same MS-RPC
and file copy operations as an NT client. This means that
Imprints can also be used to install printers on remote Windows
NT print servers.
For more information on Imprints, visit the project homepage
at
http://imprints.sourceforge.net/.
