[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#846381: avahi-daemon: cups frequently forgets about all printers untils restarting avahi-daemon

[Brian Potkin]

tags 846381 moreinfo
thanks



Thanks you for your report, Helmut.


On Wed 30 Nov 2016 at 20:57:01 +0100, Helmut Grohne wrote:

> Package: avahi-daemon
> Version: 0.6.31-5
> Control: affects -1 cups-daemon
> 
> Since Debian jessie, cups uses avahi to broadcast its printers to the
> local network. I have a jessie cups with a few printers and publish them
> via avahi. Now I am seeing a little weird behaviour on client systems:
> After booting their cups daemons know about the broadcasted printers,
> but after some time (usually a few times a day) they forget. I have no

What are the symptoms?  How do you know that the printing system does
not see the remote broadcasted printers on the clients?

> clue what causes the client cups to forget about all network printers,
> but after issuing "service avahi-daemon restart" on the client machine,
> all the printers are back.  Restarting something else (such as cups)
> doesn't get me the printers back instead. This lets me conclude that
> avahi-daemon somehow is the cause. I am observing this with both jessie
> and unstable client systems, so stretch is affected. The

cups-browsed browses the mdns broadcasts and makes the remote printers
available to applications.

> avahi-daemon.conf is pretty much the default with the exception of
> setting disable-publishing=yes on all client systems. I have no idea how
> to reliably trigger this bug (beyond waiting a day). Before and after
> restarting avahi-daemon, the output of "avahi-browse -at" looks no
> different (i.e. printers always show up there).

Being able to reproduce behaviour is always a plus and, in some cases,
a necessity.
 
> I understand that this bug description is quite vague. Still, it is
> fairly annoying and as it happens on multiple systems some of which are
> pretty close to defaults, I believe still believe it to be a bug. I
> already spent considerable time trying to diagnose it and intend to do
> further diagnosis if someone can provide hints as to what to check. It
> might even be a cups bug. Please reassign as appropriate.

First things first. Are you still experiencing this behaviour on an
up-to-date unstable/testing system?