Bug#868728: cups requires do lpadmin configuration to share printers
On Mon 17 Jul 2017 at 20:56:48 -0400, Antoine Beaupre wrote:
> Package: cups
> Version: 2.2.1-8
> Severity: normal
>
> Hi!
Hello Antoine. Thank you for your report.
> When trying to share my printers with my roommates through the CUPS
> web interface, I quickly found the "Share printers connected to this
> system" button and clicked it. And lo and behold, other Linux (and
> probably Mac, haven't tried) computers just see the printers and can
> print to it. Great!
What do you mean by "just see the printers"? My understanding would be
that when you switch your server on, its printers simply appear in the
output of 'lpstat -a' (and in the printing dialogs of applications) on
client machines. This is achieved through the agency of cups-browsed and
does not involve the owners of these machines touching a single key on
the keyboard. If they have done, they are probably going about it in
the wrong way. Close down your server and the printers disappear from
'lpstat -a'.
> But when they do, they get this mysterious error message: "Filter
> failed". Searching for that error message on the web is a dead end:
> you end up with all sorts of errors with foomatic-db not being
> configured properly and so on. This problem is remote-specific:
> printing works fine on the local machine, just not from the remote
> CUPS clients.
We would need an error_log from a client to get to the bottom of this.
The Printing section on wiki will guide you on this. Please compress
the file before sending it to the bug.
> I have found this bug in the RedHat bugtracker that seems similar to
> the situation I'm seeing here:
>
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1010580
>
> This is another forum with the simple solution:
>
> https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2254352
>
> .. which is to run the following command, in a terminal:
>
> sudo lpadmin -p HP-LaserJet-p3015 -m raw
>
> where "HP-LaserJet-p3015" is the printer name.
>
> It seems to me a little odd that I would need to do this, as a user. I
> would expect the graphical interface to do the right thing, or just
> not offer the functionality at all. In the RH bugtracker, there's a
> debate regarding whether this is an actual bug, as this seems to be
> upstream's behavior of choice, but I fail to see how this is an
> appropriate response... I am using what are mostly default
> configurations here and didn't do anything special on the remote
> computer.
cups-browsed does the right thing. The web interface does the right
thing too; a user who chose other than the raw "PPD" as an alternative
to using cups-browsed would be working against it.
> It seems to me it would be essential to be able to share printers
> through the GUI in Debian, out of the box. Having people go through
> the commandline to workaround such an issue seems to defeat the whole
> point of having that GUI in the first place.
>
> Or did I miss something?
The Printer section's account of "Double Filtering" on the wiki? :)
Regards,
Brian.
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