It's tax season again, so once again I am putting myself through the utter hell that is attempting to print my city's Income Tax Forms.
(Yes, this is mandatory. No, they do not accept electronic submissions. You must use paper and ink. Yes, they require you to print your own forms. No, they will not mail you a form.) Whatever I managed to do last year... it's not working this year. I can only assume that my workplace's lovely IT department has taken even more drastic steps in their eternal war against anything that isn't blessed by Microsoft, and isn't under their control. When I tried to print this year's tax form to my local printer, I learned that the default print queue I had set up last year is no longer there. This led to a complete rerun of everything from last year -- going up to the printer, looking at the piece of paper attached to the front of it which has the IP address (same one -- 10.76.172.100), attempting to find a queue in CUPS which matches up with that, sending print jobs to what *appears* to be the correct printer, having no paper come out, etc. Eventually I unearthed this thread, which had some advice which worked in the past. It is not working today. Here's a run-down: 1) Someone suggested: avahi-discover -r _print-caps._tcp When I tried it last year, it simply hung with no visible output until Ctrl-C'ed. This year, I ran it while physically present in the workplace, so now I know why it hangs. It pops up an X11 window. Only after you close that X11 window does it print results on the terminal. That's extremely difficult to detect or deal with when you're ssh-ing in, running commands in a screen session. 2) Also suggested: avahi-browse -rt _ipp._tcp This year, the output of that command no longer contains my printer's IP address. Last year, it did. I have no idea why this has changed. 3) Also suggested: driverless Here's what I get this year: wooledg:~$ driverless ipp://Canon%20LBP712Cdn%20(db%3Ac0%3Ad3)._ipp._tcp.local/ That's all. And no, that's not the right printer. That's the one that has the right model number, but isn't *mine*. I can only imagine it's somewhere else on this floor, and that someone is very confused upon seeing income tax forms coming out of it. 4) Also mentioned: port 9100. For grins, I did "telnet 10.76.172.100 9100" and after that connected I typed "HELLO WORLD", then pressed Enter, then Ctrl-] q Enter to close the telnet session. That actually printed the words HELLO WORLD on a sheet of paper. So the printer WORKS. It is ON THE NETWORK. I can print TEXT to it using port 9100. What I CANNOT do is find it in CUPS. Or avahi-browse, or driverless, or any of these other commands that are so allegedly wonderful. Is there any way I can tell CUPS "Please set up a queue for a printer whose IP address is 10.76.172.100 even though you can't discover it with your fancy tools"? Or do I need to use a Windows PC/Laptop to print this stupid form? Oh, and if it's any help, here's everything that's on the piece of paper attached to the printer (I took a picture of it with a cell phone, and carried the phone back to my desk so I can type it all out): D#: D14841 P#: IP: 10.76.172.100 Queue \\SPS\S010NEURD14841M Model # Canon LBP712Cdn Serial # NGDA008248 Bldg: S Flr: 10 Zone: Main Room: 007 Epic ID Notes B9754 My burning hatred of printers and this printing system remains unquenched.