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4 Imprints (Installation Manager of Printer driver
5 Retreival and Installation for Samba) is a project to
6 implement a UNIX equivalent of the Windows NT APW.
7 It has been taken on in part by the Samba Team, VA Linux
8 Systems and Hewlett-Packard. The Imprints toolset seeks
9 to provide central repository for users and administrators
10 to locate, download, and install all variations Window
11 95/98/NT printer drivers on Samba print servers.
13 The server portion of Imprints is composed of a database
14 server which contains information and locations of various
15 printer driver packages. This server can be queried over
16 standard HTTP get requests and should therefore be available
17 to most administrators behind firewalls. The server's
18 database consists of records containing data about each
19 known printer driver package. For example, each driver
20 record contains a URL from which the Imprints installation
21 client can download the package as well as a public key which
22 can be used to verify the package's integrity.
24 Once downloaded, the installation client will attempt to
25 install the printer driver on the defined remote server
26 using the username and password provided by the administrator.
27 If the username/password pair can be authenticated by the
28 remote server (and has the appropriate authorization), then
29 the printer driver(s) is (are) installed and the new Printer
32 From Samba's point of view, the process of creating a new
33 printer via the Imprints installation client is identical to
34 that of using the Windows NT APW. In fact, Imprints utilizes
35 Samba's rpcclient and smbclient tools to issue the same MS-RPC
36 and file copy operations as an NT client. This means that
37 Imprints can also be used to install printers on remote Windows
40 For more information on Imprints, visit the project homepage
43 http://imprints.sourceforge.net/.