Package: cupsys-client Version: 1.2.11-3 Severity: important My friend gave me the IPP URL of his printer. Not knowing much about this newfangled protocol, I installed cupsys-client, thinking (based on the package description) it would be a cinch to access the printer. It turned out to be an ordeal. I'm filing this bug as important even though nothing is necessarily (?) broken, because basic functionality is either missing or exceedingly difficult and frustrating to figure out. If this should be routed upstream, let me know, but I thought it would be best to start in the Debian BTS.
The URL was of the form ipp://192.168.0.10/printers/HPLJ1012 I started by looking in the lp and lpstat man pages, expecting to find a URL option. Nothing. Then I tried to find some documentation on what to do with the URL, what parts of it to pass to what options of lp/lpstat. All I found was the IPP URL RFC, which isn't very accessible and is not helpful directly. So I experimented. I started with the lpstat program. Passing 192.168.0.10 to the -h option was fairly obvious. Using the -r option, I was able to ping the server. But using, say, -t returned several repetitions of "lpstat: Forbidden" and nothing else useful. I figured maybe I had to query this printer specifically. The first problem is I didn't know whether the name of the printer should be "/printers/HPLJ1012", "HPLJ1012", or something else. I tried passing variations to -a, -p, and -v, but I always got "lpstat: Unknown destination \"HPLJ1012\"!". So it seemed like the remote server didn't recognize the printer name. But when I investigated further by running the command under strace, I found that the string HPLJ1012 was never even sent to the server! In fact, the "Unknown destination" message was printed after failed attempts to read a file called lpoptions. Why it needs to read a local file about a remote printer I have no idea. I looked at the lpoptions man page, but I didn't see anything that looked relevant. At a loss, I turned my attention to lp, and finally I caught a break. I passed HPLJ1012 to the -d option, gave a PDF file on the command line (although the man page says nothing about what format the file should be in, so that was a guess), and got a printout. Looking at the strace of the run, I found it curious that there were several "POST /" requests that all got "403 Forbidden" responses, before finally a "POST /printers/HPLJ1012" (hey--this program does know how to construct the URL, it just doesn't accept it!) succeeded. I don't know whether this represents a misconfiguration of the server, or futility on the part of the client. And even after this, I never figured out how to use lpstat to get job status, etc. So in the end, I can at least print (though not query), but I still don't know how I was supposed to figure it out. If I missed something, maybe it could be documented more prominently. Andrew -- System Information: Debian Release: lenny/sid APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable') Architecture: i386 (i686) Kernel: Linux 2.6.21-1-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash Versions of packages cupsys-client depends on: ii adduser 3.102 Add and remove users and groups ii cupsys-common 1.2.11-3 Common UNIX Printing System(tm) - ii libc6 2.5-11 GNU C Library: Shared libraries ii libcupsys2 1.2.11-3 Common UNIX Printing System(tm) - ii libgnutls13 1.6.3-1 the GNU TLS library - runtime libr ii zlib1g 1:1.2.3-15 compression library - runtime Versions of packages cupsys-client recommends: ii cupsys-bsd 1.2.11-3 Common UNIX Printing System(tm) - -- no debconf information -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]