RFE: Cloning/Relay/Load-Balancing Functionality

[michaelrsweet]

This issue tracks additions to cupssharingd to support:

• Cloning of queues on another server
• Relay of print jobs to another server
• Load balancing of print jobs between servers

Some of this used to be provided by the old CUPS browsing protocol and the subsequent cups-browsed utility.

[tillkamppeter]

Here we should also compare with the clustering, printer list filtering, and and queue relaying features of cups-browsed. In sum, we need to assure that any feature users got used to with CUPS 2.x + cups-browsed should also be available with CUPS 3.x (except features not applicable to CUPS 3.x, like creating local permanent queues for IPP print destinations for which CUPS provides temporary queues).

[zdohnal]

I agree with already mentioned features:

• cloning (point one print server to another to provide extra layer in the infrastructure, and do this by one directive which will install permanent queues which can be shared further down),
• load balancing/high availability - job goes to a free print queue based on a scheduling algorithm, like round-robin,
• relay of print jobs,
• clustering,
• print queue filtering.

On the top of that, I would propose failover functionality.