Mass change of default printer settings

From the command line you can see the installed printers with this command:

lpinfo -v

You can change the configuration like this:

lpadmin -p <printer name> <options>

You are probably interested in changing the device uri. This should contain the IP address. Change it like this:

lpadmin -p <printer name> -v <new uri>

Printer configuration is stored in /etc/cups/printers.conf You could also look around in there for the current configuration. See the CUPS documentation here for details:

http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/doc-1.4/ref-printers-conf.html

What I usually do (modern 2008+ might have better ways) is set the default setting to black and white (you do that on the print server printer default settings) which will get used by connecting clients.

Then instruct the users that to print in colour, they have to explicitly set the printer to do that (as they wouldn't normally print in colour so it's simple exception handling). It will then revert to black and white for the next session.

But your way should work as well if you set up two print queues on the server for the same printer, and use different printer default settings?