Overview

This page is intended to help Site Directors (and their staff) for the PacNW Regional Contest arrange support for printing from team machines running the PacNW Contest OS image. Additional information on various topics related to contest sites can also be found here.

Firewalls Settings

The Contest OS image contains a set of default rules in the Ubuntu firewall (iptables). These rules enforce restrictions such that teams cannot access any network locations other than those approved for the Regional Contest. (The allowed/required network access rules are that team machines need to be able to access IP address 184.72.52.244 on ports 443/tcp, 80/tcp, and 8080/tcp, and get the response to those outbound connections. Team machines must also have DNS access (TCP & UDP on port 53. )

Because the above are the only addresses/ports that team machines are allowed to access under the default configuration, this means that by default they will not be able to access facilities such as network printers in your lab. If you want teams to be able to use your network printer, you will need to modify the file /etc/iptables.rules to allow such access.

There are several standard “network printer” protocols in common use; for example,

• IPP (Internet Printing Protocol), which typically runs on port 631;
• Print Spooler, which typically runs on port 515; and
• PDL Data Streaming, which typically runs on port 9100.

If your setup uses any of these protocols, you will find “commented-out” lines in /etc/iptables.rules which are basically templates for enabling the corresponding protocol. To enable one of these templates, remove the # (comment-marker) at the start of the corresponding lines, and replace the entry of the form a.b.c.d in each line with the IPv4 address of your printer or print server.

If your printer uses some other protocol then you will have to update /etc/iptables.rules to allow the access required by that protocol.

CUPS

Some Regional Contests have had success in using CUPS (the Common Unix Printing System) for handling printing. If you are familiar with CUPS you may find the following CUPS configuration file of some use:

# Printer configuration file for CUPS v1.1.23
# Written by cupsd on Fri 23 Sep 2005 04:44:52 PM CDT
<DefaultPrinter contest>
Info
Location
DeviceURI ipp://printsrv:631/classes/contest
State Idle
Accepting Yes
JobSheets none none
QuotaPeriod 0
PageLimit 0
KLimit 0
</Printer>
	    

	    to create a Banner Page
Once printer is created
Edit file /etc/cups/printers.conf
Modify the line with “JobSheets none none” to “JobSheets contest none”
This will print the banner named contest at the beginning of the print job

Create banner file in /usr/share/cups/banners/contest
Contents of the file:
#PDF-BANNER
Template standard.pdf
Show job-originating-user-name job-id job-name options time-at-processing
	    

	    note for Generic PCL Laser Printer configure it locally
	    from you are doing the imaging.   As you need the ppd is generated
	    along with the printers.conf
	    

Update History

January 2, 2024       Updated for PacNW Spring 2024.
February 10, 2023       Added sections on Firewalls and CUPS.
February 8, 2023        Initial version.