[cups] Autoselect correct PPD on Mac OS X?

Julian Daniel jdaniel at smcdsb.on.ca
Mon Jun 27 06:59:57 PDT 2016


Thanks for your suggestion, Doug, however with a 1G fibre WAN and ping
times under 1 ms, I don't think it's a problem with latency.

I see the client request and receive a response from the CUPS server (and
ACK the response and FIN the conversation), and request SNMP info directly
from the Xerox copier multiple times, each time getting (and ACKing) "null"
as the response. Any other HP, Brother, or Samsung printer I've tried
returns the printer manufacturer and model in the SNMP response and all OS
versions choose the correct PPD - it's only Xerox copiers that stubbornly
report blank.

For some reason, El Crapitan (10.11) chooses the correct driver regardless
- I guess newer versions of CUPS client must revert to other information
sources besides SNMP printer info. I think Mac OS X 10.5 and lower also
worked correctly.

Is there anything that can be done on the server side to force the client
to choose/use/download the PPD from the server rather than trying to get it
from the printer and defaulting to generic?


Julian Daniel
Network Administrator,
Information & Communications Technology (ICT)
Catholic Education Centre
Simcoe Muskoka CDSB
+1-705-722-3555 ext 201 <+17057223555,201>
jdaniel at smcdsb.on.ca



On 27 June 2016 at 05:17, Douglas Kosovic <doug at uq.edu.au> wrote:

> Hi Julian,
>
> > > I've also created Wide Area Bonjour entries in DNS with exactly the
> > > same data output by the server, however it seems that anything stated
> > > in my entries is ignored by the client - it just queries the server
> > > and then the printer itself, and only uses the _ipp._tcp (and cups and
> > > universal) entries to find the server.
> > >
> > > Can please you help me figure out what's missing, or how I can change
> > > my config so that the client pays attention to the CUPS server and
> > > either downloads the PPD from the server or uses a
> > > previously-installed version on the local drive
> > (/Library/Printers/PPD/Contents/Resources/)?
> > >
> > > And why does it work some of the time, or only on specific OSes?
>
> I suspect it's related to latency and timeouts, for Macs closest to our
> server room, it's not an issue, but for the ones further away and on VPN,
> they sometimes have to try up to 3 times before seeing the correct printer
> type and not generic.
>
> I think the timeout might be shorter on some versions of OS X, so are more
> prone to the issue.
>
>
>
> Cheers,
> Doug
> _______________________________________________
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> cups at cups.org
> https://www.cups.org/mailman/listinfo/cups
>

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