A long time ago, right here in this galaxy I wrote a post detailing how to setup a CUPS client for printing through a CUPS server. For the post in question, it dealt with a USB printer connected to a CUPS server. I’ve had exactly zero problems with the setup since I figured it out.
We also have a network based printer that the Wife uses in her office. In order to ease setup issues(oh the irony of those words), I also setup the CUPS server to work with her printer. So now, from the server, I could print to either printer.
But for the longest time I have not been able to get a client to work with this printer using the CUPS server. It’s made no sense to me in all this time because I’ve been following the above mentioned post, double checking everything along the way.
I’ve taken shots at making it work off and on for many months now. It was always been a thorn in my side because it made no sense that I couldn’t make it work. I’ve always ended up walking away from the problem in disgust, unable to figure it out.
Finally today, I figured out the problem. And it just hits home a little debugging heuristic that I always seem to forget: the more baffling the problem, the more likely it’s the result of missing something simple. In other words, rather than having some strange imagined problem involving the network, the problem was a rather simple configuration setting.
Turns out, the printer has to be shared on the CUPS server. This is a simple checkbox option that appears during the printer setup process in CUPS. How I missed something that basic for so long, I just don’t know.