I seem to remember years ago (though I may be misremembering), before avahi even existed, CUPS may have had a feature whereby printers connected to machines on the LAN that were also driven by a CUPS server would be discoverable on the LAN.

Printers which themselves are able to connect to the LAN seem to be discoverable without avahi or samba. But I tried several times today to get CUPS on one machine on the LAN (running Slackware Current) to discover a printer connected to another machine on the network (also running Slackware Current) without installing avahi and rebuilding CUPS with avahi support.

I turned on printer sharing using system-config-printer which modified /etc/cups/cupsd.conf accordingly.

I tried running rc.cups-browsed on the client (and the server), and tried modifying /etc/cups/cups-browsed.conf to add a BrowsePoll line with an IP range that would cover the LAN. I even tried specifying the actual IP address of the CUPS server I was trying for the client to discover, and nothing worked.

If I go ahead and just manually punch in the IP address of the server into my printer configurator, it does connect and print to it successfully. But that is not ideal and I would prefer for printers on the network which are also driven by CUPS to be discoverable.

My cups logs complain a lot about not being able to locate the 'ippfind' utility. I do not know if that is a real problem or just a red herring. Most of my googling has led me to believe that this error is largely superfluous.

I suppose I could try to rebuild cups and modify the slackbuild to include the ippfind utility.

But other than that, am I missing something obvious here?

CUPS has never required SAMBA. SAMBA was only required for CUPS to support Windows printers and Windows clients.

I do not recall using auto-discovery for printers often. I always hard-coded the address of servers and printers, and manually locked in the CUPS settings for those. Workstations can float, but any kind of server should not float ((in any of MY networks anyway)).

Have you checked the CUPS documentation for clues about the support there for what you want to accomplish?

I don't mean to be silly or disrespectful, but I'm assuming you restarted CUPS? You just didn't mention that after changing the conf files that you actually restarted CUPS? Sorry to nit-pic. Cheers.

Not a problem. Yes I did restart cups on the client and server side.

I have read through the docs and it seems Avahi is required at this juncture for native discovery. It may well be that in the past it was not, or that I'm just misremembering.

Anyway, for now I'll just decide whether to run SAMBA on the server side since I'm quite familiar with that, or ensure the server on the LAN gets a persistent IP by the router's DNS server.

Yes, starting with CUPS 1.6 there was a significant move to drop the UDP-based CUPS Browsing feature (although cups-browsed can still be used to provide this legacy browsing if desired). Instead, DNS-SD is used as the primary mechanism method for "automatic" network printer and CUPS server discovery. CUPS still includes the legacy snmp backend (using SNMPv1) for network printer discovery as well. For those using HPLIP, the hp-setup utility uses one of two methods to find printers on the network - Service Location Protocol (SLP) and Bonjour for HP printer discovery.

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