IPPEs

 

IPP Everywhere sucks

A small project to allow old printers to be installed without IPP Everywhere.

 

Reason behind this project

The main reason of this project is decision taken by the CUPS maintainer to drop support for PPD files and now rely on IPP Everywhere by default and print a warning when using a PPD file:

$ lpadmin -p test -E -v ipp://[REDACTED] -m uld-samsung/Samsung_C48x_Series.ppd
lpadmin: Printer drivers are deprecated and will stop working in a future version of CUPS.

For the moment, the printer can be installed with lpadmin as shown above and the result can be seen with lpstat:

$ lpstat -t | grep -i test
device for test: ipp://[REDACTED]
test accepting requests since sam 01 jui 2023 14:30:38
printer test is idle.  enabled since sam 01 jui 2023 14:30:38

and it works! - which is not the case with the everywhere driver is selected...

But what will happens when the PPD files support will be removed? Owners of old printers will have to buy a new one to be able to print their documents??

HELL NO!!

That's why I've made this project, to allow end-users to be able to install their old printers without having to pass a complete night to debug everything and finally make it work without really knowing how 😅

Required tools

In order to be able to run the script or simply debug things by yourself, you will need the following commands:

• lpstat
• lpinfo
• lpadmin

Optionally, if you have avahi enabled and want to use it, you will then need these commands:

• avahi-browse
• driverless

You can install them with the following packages:

• cups or cups-client
• avahi-utils (if using avahi)

If you want to see the network packets exchanged between your computer and your printer, you will also need to install the tcpdump package.

Here is an example command:

$ sudo tcpdump -Xvni any "port 5353 or port 631 or port 9001"

References

• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/CUPS
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/CUPS/Printer-specific_problems
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/CUPS/Troubleshooting
• OpenPrinting/cups-sharing#4
• https://wiki.debian.org/CUPSDriverlessPrinting
• https://wiki.debian.org/CUPSIPPEverywhere
• https://www.pwg.org/ipp/everywhere.html
• apple/cups#5088
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Avahi
• https://github.com/lathiat/nss-mdns

Author

• Jiab77