OSX Clients not attempting CUPS-Get-PPD operation

[Douglas Kosovic]

Hi Nick,

"Nick Cammorato"  wrote in message nntp:cups.general :

> With the death of the Xserve and no legal way to virtualize OSX, I'm
> attempting to transition our print server from Cups 1.5.3 on OSX10.7 
> server
> to Cups 1.6.1 on CentOS6.3 (avahi and ghostscript also at the latest,
> cups-filters at 1.0.25) and have run into a very strange issue.

I'm using  Scientific Linux 6.3 which would be more or less the same as 
CentOS. I started of with the cups-1.6.1 RPM from Fedora Rawhide, modified 
it and applied additional patches from Ubuntu and CUPS SVN. The other RPM 
dependencies were based on RPMs from Rawhide and earlier version of Fedora.

I'm not sure if a pristine build of cups-1.6.1 from the source tar ball will 
work correctly in regards to PPD retrieval between OSX client and Linux 
server, I think there are a number of patches that are required or use the 
1.6.1 SVN branch.

I have OSX 10.6, 10.7 and 10.8 clients, for the 10.6 Snow Leopard clients, I 
had to turn encryption off for the PPD retrieval to work, otherwise the PPDs 
would either not be retrieved or be truncated. In cupsd.conf I added :

<Location /printers>
  <Limit CUPS-Get-PPD CUPS-Get-PPDs CUPS-Get-Printers>
    Encryption Never
    Order allow,deny
    Allow all
    Order deny,allow
  </Limit>
</Location>

elsewhere in cupsd.conf, encryption is still enabled.

> When adding a queue via bonjour on the OSX clients, the following 
> differing
> behaviors are shown:
> 1.  The print queue shows up as "bonjour shared" on the OSX server, while 
> it
> shows up as "bonjour" on the Linux server.
> 2.  When adding the queue the OSX client does a CUPS-Get-PPD operation 
> ONLY
> when adding the queue from the OSX server, which downloads the driver and
> configures any options that were configured on the server(IE: Extra 
> trays).
> It does not attempt this when adding the queue that's on the Linux server,
> as verified via access logs and sniffing the traffic.  The access and 
> error
> logs look identical on both servers up until that point.

If the print queue is showing up as "Bonjour", OSX's add printer will never 
retrieve the PPD, but will if the queue is listed as "Bonjour Shared".

I found a bug with OSX versions up to 10.8 Mountain Lion, if the print queue 
was advertised as ipps, but not ipp, it would never get listed as "Bonjour 
Shared". I'm currently advertising both ipp and ipps.

On the OSX client, if you issue the following on the command line, it will 
list the print queues that will show up as "Bonjour Shared" :
   dns-sd -B _ipp._tcp,_cups
if you drop the ",_cups" subtype, you'll see all the print queues, including 
the remainder that'll show up as just "Bonjour".



Cheers,
Doug