Using cups to print to windows domain with password in a separate file

Question

Every guide I've seen so far that explains how to print to a Windows print server from CUPS, indicates to put the username and password, in plain text, in the Device URI either in the web interface (localhost:631) or in the /etc/cups/printers.conf

smb://user:password@hostname/printer

The trouble is my password contains spaces and special characters. When I attempt this, I still get NT authentication failures when printing test pages. I can connect via smbclient:

smbclient -L //ourprintserver01 -Uourdomain\\myusername

I've tried to create a /etc/samba/printing.auth file with the correct username, password and domain in it, as I've seen in some tutorials, but this still doesn't allow cups to properly authenticate. Is there a way to tell CUPS to use this file, or keep the password, username and domain in some other file cups can use?

Answer 1

If you create the printer, either through the web ui or via lpadmin with a URL with the special characters % encoded like this:

lpadmin -p fake -v smb://bob:pass%20word@rice/BLAH -P /tmp/foo.ppd

then the password will be stored in the /etc/cups/printers.conf file (which is readable only by root) and will not be displayed in the web UI.

Be careful though as if you accidentally enter a malformed URL then the cups web-ui won't be able to figure out which bit is the password and it will be displayed.