[cups.bugs] [LOW] STR #3464: cupsd resolves localhost to both IPv4 and IPv6 address even if only 1 is set

Michael Sweet msweet at apple.com
Wed Jan 6 08:51:39 PST 2010


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[STR Closed w/o Resolution]

[This will be my last comment on this bug - we are not changing the current
behavior that has existed since CUPS 1.1.15 or so]

Issues 1-2 account for 90% of the network/printing issues reported by our
users over the last 10 years of supporting CUPS. At first we didn't change
things, trying to "educate" people about the problems of deleting localhost
from /etc/hosts or defining localhost in the local domain. When that didn't
work (and we were handling at least one support call about it on a daily
basis), we made the change to not resolve localhost, which *eliminated*
those support calls basically overnight.

Issue 3 has become more prevalent in recent years due to the widespread
use of wireless networking and accounts for ALL of the (hundreds of
thousands of) hung printing reports we have had on Linux and Mac OS X.

There is no reason to ever expect localhost to resolve to other than
127.0.0.1 and ::1, and if IPv6 is not enabled then CUPS automatically does
not use it (because the OS will not bind or connect the IPv6 address...)

If you have systems that still allow binding to an IPv6 listening address
that is not supported by that system, that is an OS bug and not a CUPS
bug.

I am happy to add documentation to the cupsd.conf reference about
"localhost" being handled specially.

Link: http://www.cups.org/str.php?L3464
Version: 1.3.11
Fix Version: Will Not Fix





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