Ubuntu 14.04 CUPS problem

Question

I recently upgraded from 12.04 to 14.04 on my laptop and I am not able to print on a network printer via CUPS anymore. If I run

system-config-printer

I get the error

There was an error during the CUPS operation: 'Bad Request'.

If I run

system-config-printer --debug

I get the following output:

OpenPrinting: Init ('en_US', 'UTF-8') 1 0
+<NewPrinterGUI object at 0x7ff964028460 (newprinter+NewPrinterGUI at 0xea5ba0)>
Connected as user roberto
+<PrinterPropertiesDialog object at 0x7ff964041dc0   (printerproperties+PrinterPropertiesDialog at 0xf0b3a0)>
<authconn.Connection instance at 0x7ff964033830>: Operation += obtaining queue details
Authentication pass: 1
Authentication: password callback set
1024: u'Bad Request'

If I instead run the command with sudo I can access the dialog and set the printers, but then the applications that do not run as root cannot see the printers set by root.

The variable

CUPS_SERVER

is set and exported both by the .profile in my home directory and in /etc/profile.

I googled unsuccessfully so far. I also reinstalled cups after having removed it with --purge. Any hint?

Solution

We had the same issue after updating from 12.04 to 14.04, same error dialog box but still able to see the printers via a browser, and a similar error message from system-config-printer --debug . Here was the solution that worked in our case:

In /etc/cups/cupsd.conf we replaced the default browsing section with:

# Show shared printers on the local network.
Browsing On
BrowseOrder allow,deny
# (Change '@LOCAL' to 'ALL' if using directed broadcasts from another
subnet.)
BrowseAllow @LOCAL
BrowsePoll printhost.yourserveraddress.com

And in /etc/cups/client.conf we added /version=1.1 to the server address:

ServerName printhost.yourserveraddress.com/version=1.1

After restarting cups with sudo service cups restart the network printers were visible and usable.

I hope you found a solution sooner than this, but I wanted to reply here as I found this question when I had this problem the other day, and hopefully it'll help anyone else updating to 14.04 a little late.

Comments

[saiarcot895]

What is the output of groups?

[user626207]

roberto adm lp dialout cdrom plugdev lpadmin admin sambashare

[user626207]

Other info: with firefox running normally (not as root) I can see the page localhost:631 and I can see all printers. However, the print dialog box doesn't show the same printer configured by root, and I can't run system-config-printer to set them!