[cups.general] Isn't there an alternative?

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Tue, 2013-02-26 at 13:04 -0800, . wrote:
> For 15 years, CUPS has made me want to kill myself, time and again.
> Isn't there an alternative?

For just about as long it has worked extremely reliably for me; both at
home with 2 printers and at work with 114 printers.

> Lately it simply will not print to my Xerox Phaser 8860 network
> printer INTERMITTENTLY.  Usually fails when I have an emergency, like
> right now.

Ah, do not blame CUPS.  Just a few weeks ago I finally managed to kick
the last Xerox Phaser off my [work] network; replaced by better and MUCH
MORE RELIABLE Brother MFC-9970 units.

> I can ping the printer from anywhere, and it is showing online and
> Idle in the Cups webpage.  But I send a job to it and it never sees
> it.  Never shows up in jobs and the printer never goes busy.
> The only thing in the logs is in the err.log:
> E [26/Feb/2013:12:47:38 -0800] Unable to open listen socket for
> address [v1.::1]:631 - Address family not supported by
> protocol.[/code]
> Well I did an in-depth file search for phaser-RGB in /etc
> and /home/{user} and it does not exist.  I am at my wit's end.
> What could possibly be wrong?

How are you attempting to submit jobs to the printer - LPD, IPP, SOCKET,
etc... ?   If you look in "netstat --tcp" is there a connection between
your CUPS instance and the printer? And what state is it in?

CUPS can only do so much to work around an extremely flakey and poorly
desgined device.  I'd first suggest just trying a different mechanism to
submit jobs to the printer;  if you are using LPD switch to SOCKET.