network printing with cups is a bit flakey...

[bendy]

I originally posted in the desktop forum, but now realise it's not a kde problem, so here goes....

I have a home network set up. An old thinkpad running debian woody is a file and print server using nfs and cups. A deskjet 970 Cxi is connected to the parallel port and local printing direct from this machine using cups works fine every time.

There are two client machines which I want to send print jobs from. One is a desktop triple booting gentoo, debian and win2k connected via a 10base nic and swtich to the thinkpad server. The other is a laptop running gentoo connecting via a linksys wireless nic and access point. Both gentoo machines have cups installed and use kde3.0.2. The desktop when booted into debian runs cups and kde2.2.2.

I used the printer set up facility in kde's control center to set up cups on the thinkpad server. It is set to broadcast the printer info to the specific ip addresses of the 2 clients.

First time I set up printing on the clients, again using kde control centre, they automagically detected the network printer and it worked fine for 2 days.

Then, printing stopped working in both gentoo clients. Going to the printing section of kde's control centre on the cleints gave an immediate client_error_not_found message. This message also appeared when using the cups web browser based interface. However, printing still worked on the desktop machine when I booted into debian.

Ignoring the message on the desktop machine in gentoo, I used the add printer wizard to add a remote cups printer. This worked, and suddenly the laptop printing started working again with no config changes. After a few hours, it stopped working again with client_error_not_found error messages.

I can always print a test page locally from the thinkpad server, and can always ping it from the clients, when printing doesn't work.

I read the cups and kde printing docs, and googled this problem, but there don't seem to be many resources discussing linux-to-linux network printing with cups (but lots for networking printing for windows clients with samba).

Any ideas anyone? I have version 1.1.15 of cups on the gentoo boxes, and an older version in debian. Is it a network issue rather than cups? I'm pulling my hair out here (what little I have left....).

TIA,

Bendy.

[Miles]

I don't know exactly what's wrong with your setup. Anything interesting in the cups error log? Also does the problem fix itself if you restart the cupsd daemon?