Simulted printer import on MacOS X

[Helge Blischke]

On my MacBook I cannot make use of the usual broadcast means
to print to printers on a remote cups server because of the default firwall
settings (the laptop is hidden against any connection requests from the 
outside), and active polling is not an option as the need to use the remote
cups server is only occasionally.

So I simulated the printer import by 
(1) regularly installing the (very few) printers from the remote cups server
      manually,
(2) deleting this printer's PPD from /etc/cups/ppd/ and restarting cups

This works perfectly as real printer queues of the remote cups server are
"imported" this way: the print jobs are forwarded to the remote cups server
unfiltered locally as intended.

But if I try to import a rmote cups server's classes this way, the local 
cupsd on the MacOS side generates a huge IPP request (more than 
14 kilobytes in size) which obviously contain default attributes for all
printers  the MacOS printing system knows about. The consequence
is that all filters and backends on the remote side crash with exit code 7,
and the error log on the server side tells something like
"command line options string too big".

This obviously is due to the fact that the local cupsd does not know
or is not able to determine which printers are defined behind the
requested class.

For info:

Client side:
MacOS 10.5
CUPS 1.3.8

Server side:
Sparc Solaris 10 or Unixware 7.1
CUPS 1.3.5

Helge