[arch-general] Cups 1.6 printer discovery

[mike cloaked]

On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 10:40 PM, mike cloaked <mike.cloaked at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 10:34 PM, mike cloaked <mike.cloaked at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 9:58 PM, mike cloaked <mike.cloaked at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 9:50 PM, mike cloaked <mike.cloaked at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>> OK I have avahi-daemon running on both client and server - and have
>>>>> just opened up port 5353 on both machines (mdns)
>>>>>
>>>>> avahi-browse --all now sees the printer and opening a browser on
>>>>> localhost:631 and asking to find new printers now sees the cups shared
>>>>> printer and I can now complete a set of menu options and it has set it
>>>>> up nicely.  Now the printer is seen on print options - so this is a
>>>>> great success.
>>>>>
>>>>> I think the main key item was opening port 5353 on the firewall....
>>>>>
>>>>> Thank you for your help.
>>>
>>> Actually I am not quite there - the printer appears set up but when I
>>> tried printing to it nothing came through on the printer!
>>>
>>> A little more investigation needed now....
>>> --
>>
>> It is strange - I rebooted the client - now the printer is not visible
>> in localost:631 - but if I re-run avahi-browse --all it is there again
>> - and after that I can see the printer in the cups browser management
>> interface.
>>
>> Do you have to set up the printer from scratch each time the machine
>> is booted?  Surely it is possible to make the defined printer stick
>> when using dns-sd?
>>
>> However I still have not succeeded in sending a print to the printer
>> once defined.
>>
> I get a popup in KDE saying that the printer may not be connected and
> in the cups management interface I see:
>
> processing since
> Mon 30 Jul 2012 22:38:01 BST
> "Unable to locate printer "home1.local"."
>
> I am now wondering if the fact that the server is cups version
> cups-1.5.2-9.fc16.x86_64 whereas on the laptop I have the new 1.6
> version that maybe the pre 1.6 version on the server is not playing
> nicely - or if I have some additional config work to do?
>
> It is late here and I have to quit for tonight.... I will have to
> follow up on this tomorrow.
>

After installing nss-mdns on the server machine and restarting
avahi-daemon there, and also adding the appropriate lines to
/etc/nsswitch.conf on the client arch laptop I can now set up the
printer via dnssd on the laptop, and have made a bit more progress
since asking cups to send a test page does indeed start the printer
going - however it sends an interminable set of pages full of
distorted lines which I can only stop by switching off the printer
physically and restarting it! So there is something not quite right
with the data sent from the client to the server!

So I guess that at this stage the definition of the printer using the
splix packages on the client laptop fails to work properly for print
files sent via dnssd - despite having splix run the printer perfectly
well on the server to which it is attached when sending prints from
applications on the server machine! However the server is running
Fedora F16 - so I don't know if there is a difference between the
splix packages on Fedora and arch, or not, and whether maybe I will
have to instead use a proprietary ppd file (which I do have from
several years ago used before the splix package was mature enough to
run the printer from the server for the past couple of years)

Anyway I will now explore that to see if I can define a working
printer on arch. (It is a Samsung SCX-4500W if anyone is interested)

-- 
mike c