While I've had my moments with CUPS in the past (I'd give anything, ANYTHING to be able to revert to lpr or LPRng but CUPS has gotten so insinuated into SUSE that you can't remove it.) I've run into something that takes the cake.

Basic configuration:

System A: SUSE 10.0 with an HP LJ1200 attached to the parallel port

System B: SUSE 10.0 with a Canon attached via USB. The default printer is set to the 1200 attached to System A.

System C: SUSE 10.1 with no direct attached printers. Print jobs go to either System A or B via CUPS. The default printer is set to the 1200 attached to System A.

Here's the problem:

Up until a few days ago, everyone was printing just fine. One day, System B was unable to print to its default queue. System C was still able to print. Today, System C cannot print either. Submitting a job on System B and then running lpq shows the job just sitting there in the queue. Submitting a job on System C followed by lpq show nothing waiting to print. (But nothing's actually printed.)

Thinking that the YaST interface to CUPS is not quite right, I've tried the web interface to cups using lynx (a minimal X installation was done on System A since it's only used for file and print serving). At one time I was able to connect to port 631 and get the basic menus but have not been able to administer anything. Even after setting up a user with lppasswd, attempts to configure printers are met with a "Forbidden" error message in the browser. Lately, I've been getting "404" errors when I try to connect to localhost:631. And, yes, netstat shows that cupsd is listening on port 631. (Rebooting the system didn't help.)

The only means of printing right now is when logged into System A where the 1200 is physically attached.

Does anyone know how to completely wipe a set of CUPS printer configurations? (De-install/re-install?) I'm ready to start over if that's what it takes. In fact, I think I'd prefer to do that to avoid carrying over some crufty setting that'll just cause some mysterious problem in the future.

TIA for any advise...

--
Rick

P.S. - If I don't get something working pretty soon, I'm going to have to teach a couple of fifth graders how to print by printing to a PostScript file, ftp'ing it to the print server, and dumping it to the printer with cat. Please don't force me to do that. :-}

I've been having similar problems, and I was wondering if you got anywhere with this?

I just got the update to fix this problem.
But I had to get a new update source to get it...---?????

For me the fix was a little subtle.

The problem was that a few months ago I had set up a hosts.allow and a hosts.deny to increase security on my ssh server. Since hosts.deny contained a line that said ALL:ALL, and there was no line for cups in the hosts.allow, no one was allowed to access the printer server!

Dumb dumb dumb

Anyway, I fixed my problem by adding the following line for cups in hosts.allow.

It sounds like you got it to work for you. I finally wiped the CUPS setup on all systems on the LAN. Then went back to the systems that had physically attached printers and defined queues for those. The printerless systems were set up to broadcast to the defined printers. Seems to work.

One thing that I noticed -- perhaps the update that "slackass" referred to fixes this -- was that it seems like you have to be really, really careful if you ever go into the YaST printer setup. It might reset some configuration values that you made by editing the config files. I'm going to write a wrapper script that makes a tar archive of the current CUPS config files before running "yast2 printer" (and make a mental note to never run the printer setup any other way). That way I ought to have a way to easily undo a questionable setting that breaks something that used to work.

I still find it awful that the CUPS package has gotten itself so intertwined with everything else on the system. I'd much rather see other packages have a dependency on having some printing mechanism installed rather than a particular package. Forcing CUPS to be removed and installing another printing package might work for some things (or most for many people's needs) but the package manager would be griping about it every time you fired it up. Nice of Novell to shove it down our throats.

Well, the update that fixed one of my boxes only worked for a day.
Before I had 1 of 3 boxes working, now all are hanging on the yast driver update right at the same place. (4%)
Good thing that I have Ubuntu on another partition that I can print with.