How do you administer CUPS remotely using the web interface?

Question

I have an Ubuntu server in my apartment and I just got a printer, so it's time to share!

In the past I've used CUPS on my Desktop and I'd just point the browsers to localhost:631 to set things up. Can I used the web based admin tools remotely?

I've been playing with the /etc/cups/cupsd.conf file and am currently at the point where I can direct a browser on my LAN to server-ip:631 but I'm getting the 403 Forbidden error.

If it's not possible or it's a bad idea for security reasons to allow remote administrator of CUPS, would it be possible to accomplish this using an SSH tunnel to the sever?

Solution 1

Mission achomplished! This page helped me out a lot.

All I had to do was add "Allow all" to to the access to the server and the admin pages so that my configuration now looked like:

# Restrict access to the admin pages...
<Location /admin>
  Order allow,deny
  Allow all
</Location>

# Restrict access to configuration files...
<Location /admin/conf>
  AuthType Default
  Require user @SYSTEM
  Order allow,deny
</Location>

Now I just need to figure out to only allow those on my local network to access the admin pages and the configuration files :) (though it's probably not a big deal since I don't have port forwarding for 631 set up on the router?).

EDIT: To only allow a certain computer I could have done something like

<Location /admin>
      Order allow,deny
      Allow from 10.10.10.5
</Location>

Or for the whole 10.10.10 subnet,

<Location /admin>
      Order allow, deny
      Allow from 10.10.10.*
</Location>

Solution 2

I found this way to be simpler.

# cupsctl --remote-admin --remote-any --share-printers

It will update the /etc/cups/cupsd.conf file and restart cups for you, saving a backup of the previous configuration in the same folder.

It's the similar to the method presented in the official CUPS guide to printer sharing. I found the options --remote-admin in man cupsctl.

Solution 3

The way I normally achieve this is to tunnel over ssh via an arbitrary port:

ssh [email protected] -T -L 3631:localhost:631

Secure, and allows remote access. Won't solve all problems but useful for irregular access.

Comments

[gerlos]

This tip is awesome: without changing anything on the cups configuration, you can securely administrate cups.

[FreeSoftwareServers]

Always use the recommended way first! They made the software!

[Dagrooms]

That's probably because they don't know what questions to ask; often, to use documentation, you either need to know exactly what you're looking for, or read the entire manual - not fun, and takes way too long. We also don't want to be CUPS experts, we just want to know how to flip one little switch.

[user149408]

The -T option is not really needed; it will just prevent creation of a terminal session. Leave it out if you also need a terminal session for some reason.

[hanshenrik]

i had to do sudo service cups restart after this, but then it worked! :) (debian 10 32bit)

[eri]

no restart needed for me. Debian 8,9 and Arch

[p0358]

The tool removes original comments and newlines, making the file less readable. Shame...