OS X 10.5 client and NON-OS X CUPS server: adding printers, solved

Question

Dear all,
I had trouble in adding printers under OS X 10.5, those printers are shared via a FreeBSD CUPS 1.2.10 server on the local network.
So I did the following:
- System Preferences;
- Print & Fax, right click on the leftmost part of the window, then "Reset printing system";
- Open Terminal;
- As admin via sudo or root edit the /etc/cups/cupsd.conf file and modify the first lines so they look like:
Browsing On
BrowseOrder allow,deny
BrowseAllow all
BrowseProtocols all
BrowseRemoteProtocols all
BrowsePoll hostnameof_your_cupsserver:631
BrowsePort 631
- Save the file;
- Restart the client;
- Now you should be able to see/add the printers.
This is a quick and dirty fix, hope this helps.
Regards,
Alessandro

Answer 1

Hi John,
my apologies for having misinterpreted your post. I think that Apple engineers really did a big mistake by omitting the keyword BrowseProtocol="all" in the print engine setup (cupsd.conf), since that keyword basically allows the cups-polld daemon, that is the piece of the local printing engine of OS X that can "ask" the LAN for the presence of printers, to ask for printers shared via CUPS/LDAP/SLP and so on.
I hope that this will be soon fixed in a minor release, since quite a lot of people (especially in the educational/research environments) heavily relies on a centralized CUPS server to manage tens or hundreds of printers (we do have 40+ printers, exported to more 400+ clients, both OS X and Windows).
BTW, this morning I was asking a little joke to my colleagues I said to them "300+ new features, an old one missing.. try to guess which one"
All the best,
Alessandro