Ubuntu Linux doesn't support DNS-SD for printer sharing

[Celso Pinto]

I have enabled network browsing as to setup a network printer but this didn't lead to any results.

The network printer is configured in a SuSE box and it does broadcast the printer.

Also, I've tried to publish that very same printer on the network with DNSSD, and avahi-discover in this Ubuntu box detects the network printer but gnome-cups-manager does not so I'm wondering if gnome-cups-manager supports network browsing at all.

[Ante Karamatić (ivoks)]

For CUPS sharing, please take a look at http://www.grad.hr/~ivoks/ubuntu/cups/HOWTO-enable-browsing. This is HOWTO for enabling sharing on server. To enable lookup of shared printers in Dapper, just check "Detect LAN printers" in gnome-cups-manager.

CUPS in Dapper doesn't support DNSSD.

[Celso Pinto (cpinto)]

It was a matter of restarting the server's cupsd to get it going with simple detection, yet DNSSD browsing does not work! I can further confirm this because at work I have a couple of printers published in ZeroConf's .local network and I can't get them to show up in gnome-cups-manager.

[Sebastian Dröge (slomo)]

gnome-cups-manager or cups simply doesn't support DNS-SD yet but uses it's own protocol for now

[Celso Pinto (cpinto)]

I just want to add that the CUPS team announced DNS-SD support for CUPS 1.2

[Philipp Schlesinger (philipp-sadleder)]

From [1] you can see that CUPS 1.3 contains support for DNS-SD based browsing.
As gutsy will contain a 1.3 version of CUPS, you should be happy then.

[1] http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/whatsnew.html

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Can you try my DNS-SD backend for CUPS, from

http://www.openprinting.org/download/printing/dnssd

Put it into /usr/lib/cups/backend/ and make it executable. Then your network will also get scanned via DNS-SD/Zeroconf. This works with ALL printer setup tools: gnome-cups-manager, system-config-printer, KDE Printing Manager, CUPS web interface, ...

Please report your results here.

Note that CUPS 1.3 does not use DNS-SD for discovery of network printers. It only uses DNS-SD for making available info about the CUPS queues which are shared to the network (in addition to IPP).

This backend adds discovery of network printers via DNS-SD to all CUPS versions.

[Henrik Nilsen Omma (henrik)]

We have changed the default print management system in Ubuntu from gnome-cups-manager to system-config-printer because g-c-m is no longer maintained, so I'm reassigning this to cups.

Till, do we support DNSSD now; can we add this support?

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Yes, in Hardy we have full DNS-SD support. I have written a simple DNS-SD backend for CUPS based on avahi-browse, so that CUPS discovers network printers and DNS-SD-only broadcasted CUPS queues (for example from Mac OS X boxes) via DNS-SD. system-config-printer distinguishes between network printers and CUPS queues discovered via DNS-SD and in case of CUPS queues it does not assign a driver so that the driver from the server gets used. On the server side CUPS 1.3 broadcasts the local printers via DNS-SD and so Mac clients will find them.

   Till