[cups] Fedora does not discover Printers

[Brian Potkin]

On Sat 04 Jun 2016 at 03:24:24 -0400, Brett I. Holcomb wrote:

[...Lots of little snips...]

> What I want to do is have the client cups find the printers shared by
> the print servers on the network and allow them to be used by user
> applications.  The problem is that the Fedora client can not see the
> server's printer except under one condition I'll cover later.  

> * cups-browsed is deprecated so that's not an option

Really? Have you a reputable reference for this deprecation?

> * Some documentation says add BrowsePoll to the client cupsd.conf but
> the logs on my systems show that as an unknown command and in the 1.6.3
> and 2.1.3 docs it does not exist anymore so I can only assume that
> advice is outdated

Correct assumption.

> * Avahi is mentioned as a necessity.  It's installed on both my systems
> and running and started before cups. 
> ** Is Avahi really needed to broadcast printers and discover printers

For what you want to do - yes.

> in cups 1.6.3 and 2.1.3?  There is much confusing advice.  Some docs
> say you must have it, others you don't need it.  Some people say they
> turn it off on their servers and some leave it on so does cups need it
> or not.

These people probably had different objectives from you.

> ** If I need Avahi how do I set it up for cups? The /etc/avahi
> directory has only default config files with no services.

Installing avahi-daemon should be sufficient. It is on Debian.

> There are two ways I can get the printer to be seen on the client.
> 
> 1.  On the client run the printer setup app and add a printer that is
> ipp://serverfqdn/printername and it then becomes a local printer which
> defeats the purpose of a print server if I have to add printers
> manually to each client.  This actually prints but I have no printer
> options to adjust and the text is super large.
> 2.  I can add ServerName serverfqdn:631 to /etc/cups/client.conf on the
> client but according to cups docs that is not recommended because you
> are allowed only one server and if it goes down there is no printing
> and that's not acceptable to me.  The big problem with this is that if
> I try and print from an application the printer from the server shows
> up but the print button is grayed out.  I've tried this on several apps
> and all have a grayed out print button so this does not work. I've
> tried printing as root also and same thing.

Neither of these meets your stated objective.

> The lpr -P printername file will print but that's bypassing cups I
> assume?
> 
> So how do I set cups up to have a server that serves up printers and
> clients that simply discover the printers and let the users print to
> them.  Anything that would help clear up the confusion would be
> appreciated.

Install avahi-daemon on server and clients. Install cups-browsed on the
clients. Read documention for cups-browsed.