Hi all,
Yesterday I reported rather vaguely about the printing issues I was experiencing on our local network after the latest kernel update.
Today, I solved it, and I'm relaying this information such that others can potentially benefit from it if they run into a similar problem. :)
Firstly, I contacted Xante support and they told me I was the first to ask Linux questions; they didn't know what to do... So much for their tech support, so I then took the bull by the horns myself, and went through a debug process.
The printer I need to print to has now been shared through a Mac OS X machine, which has printers shared and these printers (two in total) appear properly in the "browsed queues" in Gnome's printer set-up utility.
However, printing a test page (either as ASCII, CUPS, or Postscript) still didn't work.
I raised the debug level to the max (i.e. "debug2") in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf and restarted cupsd. Checking the /var/log/cups/error_log shows the following relevant debug trace of a failed "print ASCII test page" command from the printer utility:
I [11/Nov/2005:12:58:36 +0100] [Job 5] Connecting to dymo-labelwriter.local on port 631... I [11/Nov/2005:12:58:36 +0100] [Job 5] Unable to connect to dymo-labelwriter.local, queuing on next printer in class... d [11/Nov/2005:12:58:37 +0100] select_timeout: 86400 seconds to browse timeout a printer
Soooo, the issue obviously resided in CUPS not being able to connect to port 631 on the MacOSX machine. This is where it got interesting, as I checked the MacOSX machine and that port was open (listing "IPP" as port-listener). Doing a remote port scan by the MacOSX's IP address showed a proper list of open ports, and doing so by the alias dymo-labelwriter.local only resulted in a 'host unknown' error.
OMG; how blatantly obvious yet easy to overlook this issue now all of a sudden became! :P Indeed... Adding the dymo-labelwriter.local alias with it's corresponging IP address to the /etc/hosts file did the trick. Now it works fine again!
Live and learn....;)
'Ave a good weekend! Olafo