Albrechts Blog

Novell iprint client on Ubuntu Karmic

Today I succeded in fixing my novell iprint client setup on Karmic, it was previously running on Ubuntu Hardy, but stopped working after the upgrade.

Karmic comes with CUPS in version 1.4.x, the latest SLED (11) still delivers an rather old iprint rpm dated Oct 2008 and has CUPS 1.3.9.

Obviously something changed in CUPS. After lot of strace, ltrace and log file reading I found the function valid_host in CUPS sources, which checks names allowed to connect via loopback. They are restricted to some versions of “localhost”. The Novell iprint binary connects with “/var/run/cups/cups.sock” set as hostname and therfore fails.

I created a patch for CUPS which (re-?) adds this to the valid_host function and now it works again.

Patch download: http://www.algepop.net/users/alge/fix-for-iprint.dpatch

Copy the patch into the debian/patches subdir of an extracted cups 1.4.x source package, add it to debian/patches/00list (preferably on top) and rebuild your debian package.

EDIT:
Some upgrade changed my printers.conf removing several lines from each printer. without re-adding those printing fails with client-error-document-format-not-supported.

The lines per Printer entry are

Filter application/vnd.cups-raw 0 -
Filter application/vnd.cups-command 0 commandtops
Filter application/vnd.cups-postscript 0 -


This entry was posted on Monday, November 16th, 2009 at 2:26 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.