I think my printing system is breaking down.

Currently, I have CUPS on one box, which connects to printers via JetDirect, lpd, Samba, etc.  All other Unix hosts send jobs to that server via lprng.  This worked fine for awhile, but now cups-lpd is buggier than ever.  Banner pages can't be disabled, and sometimes the backends randomly fail.  Printing works fine from the server all the time, though…

Do people run CUPS on every host, and then use IPP between clients and servers?  Or, are print servers going out of style, and should every client connect directly to each printer on the network?  It seems silly to run something like CUPS, which has a fairly large footprint and a number of dependencies, on every client PC, when a simple /etc/printcap file can be distributed when printers change.

Thoughts?  There has to be a better alternative.

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