I have seen many different issues with printers in the forum, but I have not found an answer that helps me with this issue.
Event though I have cups-browsed disabled, existing printers in my network are being added to the Printers menu in Gnome. When I delete them, they automatically reappear.
Moreover, they are completely non-functional, since they are mapped to /dev/null.
Does anyone know if this is known issue? Is there any solution?
Also, what service or system is the one adding printers if cups-browsed is disabled?
Thank you very much for your suggestion. I didn’t know that there was a CUPS webserver to manage printers. It is quite convenient indeed. In this interface there are not unwanted printers, so management is easier.
However, the problem persists in the sense that every time that I try to print something from any Gnome app, I get this huge list of printers on top of the two real printers that I can use. Those printers populate the Gnome printer menu also, so, even though this CUPS interface allows to easily manage only with “real” printers, using them is not so easy -because of Gnome?-.
What process is adding those printers there? Because they are impossible to remove. They repopulate the dialog without need to reboot your system. As soon as you remove one, they reappear immediately.
I may be seeing the same thing.
I have one network HP printer and it shows up in the cups web interface and when printing from the browser exactly as configured.
However, when I open sane to scan I see 3 printers to select from and I have to be careful to pick the right one.
One shows as airscan:… : one shows as I configured it with hpaio:… and the IP address as configured : The third shows similar to the proper one but the name is all in lower canse and has “queue=false” at the end. Only one will work with sane.
I also see the third printer above in the gnome settings → printers panel and if I remove it the same thing shows up with the next boot (sometimes sooner).
I never thought about avahi as the cause but will see if that can fix the problem for me. I have already disabled the service and the socket.
Immediately after disabling avahi I went into the gnome settings → printers panel and as soon as I unlocked the panel the extra printer disappeared. When I opened sane I note the extra printer has also disappeared there as well.
Thank you very much for the info about avahi and hopefully I do not need it for some other important purpose in the future.
@alciregi@computersavvy I’m bit confused, disabling the services mentioned above just like I want to work offline and then disabling network manager instead of turn it off from gnome setting. Are this necessary? I’m just wondering.
I just used the suggested actions of disabling those 2 avahi-daemon service & socket services. When I did so the extra printers disappeared from the gnome settings printers panel. I am waiting to see if that causes any other problems as I do not know if it will or won’t.
You can try the same and see if it eliminates the extra printer definitions, then over time see if it causes anything else to have a problem. Your choice to try that fix or not.
Note that this suggested fix has nothing to do with network manager or the network, only the automatically configured devices managed by avahi.
After some tests, it seems that, as already mentioned before in this thread, the problem is the avahi daemon. It is not adding the printers, but only showing that they are available. Once disconnected from the network, those printers disappear.
I have tried to change the avahi daemon configuration to not include printers, but to no avail.
I hope that, from the issue linked by Federico, they provide the option in GNOME to not autodiscover printers.
Is there a way to keep discovered printers from showing up in the list of printers in Gnome? I know this is a dead topic, but I can’t seem to find a reasonable solution for end users.
Disabling avahi and cups-browsed is a work-around. We can’t expect end users to have to do this. In fact, you probably do not want them having access to systemctl in any way. It is difficult to convince users to move to Linux if they have to use the terminal for every little thing.
Users should be able to see available printers when they are choosing to install a printer, but only see the installed printers in the applications’ print dialogs.
Please excuse if I have missed a user space solution .
Thank you all for your support.
Linux w0030 6.0.5-200.fc36.x86_64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Wed Oct 26 15:55:21 UTC 2022 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Yes
disable or remove avahi, which is responsible for the automatic printer config among other things.
I removed avahi from my daily driver about a year back to disable the automatic printer config and have had no issues in any other areas.
# dnf info avahi
Last metadata expiration check: 0:45:51 ago on Tue 15 Nov 2022 09:42:33 AM CST.
Installed Packages
Name : avahi
Version : 0.8
Release : 15.fc36
Architecture : x86_64
Size : 1.2 M
Source : avahi-0.8-15.fc36.src.rpm
Repository : @System
From repo : fedora
Summary : Local network service discovery
URL : http://avahi.org
License : LGPLv2+
Description : Avahi is a system which facilitates service discovery on
: a local network -- this means that you can plug your laptop or
: computer into a network and instantly be able to view other people who
: you can chat with, find printers to print to or find files being
: shared. This kind of technology is already found in MacOS X (branded
: 'Rendezvous', 'Bonjour' and sometimes 'ZeroConf') and is very
: convenient.
Please check