Viewing Remote CUPS Printers in Fedora 19

Scott Banwart

2013-09-02

Linux

cups, fedora, firewalld, linux, systemctl

Who Moved My Cheese?

I found out the hard way that a number of things changed between Fedora 17 and Fedora 19. One thing in particular is using CUPS and IPP to automatically access remote printers. Due to my ignorance on some of the changes with systemd and firewalld it took me a lot longer than expected to get this working after upgrading to Fedora 19.

At home I have an old laser printer connected to a small server that is shared via CUPS. In the past getting this working from my laptop has been as simple as enabling mDNS and opening the IPP port in the firewall tool. In Fedora 19 this has changed a little bit. mDNS is now enabled by default so that part is easy. This leaves getting CUPS services properly configured and opening the correct ports with firewalld.

Configuring CUPS

In Fedora 19, CUPS services have been split into a handful of separate services. I had to execute the following commands to get CUPS fully working:

1 2	sudo /usr/bin/systemctl enable cups.service sudo /usr/bin/systemctl enable cups-browsed.service

These two commands start the relevant CUPS services. The cups-browsed.service is the new service that finds and registers printers on the network.

Configure Firewalld

Now that the CUPS services are up and running we need to open the IPP client port in the firewall:

1	sudo /usr/bin/firewall-cmd --permanent --add-service=ipp-client

Once both of these steps have been completed, you should be able to see your remote CUPS printers.