Disable Cups automatic remote printer detection

Some box here in my network automatically shows remote printers provided by a cups server in this very network. Since there are no printer driver informations for this shares are provided (raw printer queues) , i don't want this behavior.

To disable it i'd to type simply

sudo cupsctl --no-remote-printers

or to edit the

/etc/cups/cupsd.conf

and set

Browsing Off

Did you search for this solution? Drop a comment rigth here.

Comments

Anonymous said…
This seems to have worked up until recently. I'm at CUPS 1.4.2 and the "Browsing Off" is ignored or makes no difference. It searches my huge network for printers and sometimes hangs doing it. I don't need it to show me a list of 100+ printers. So your method DID work, but doesn't now.
Michael Adams said…
Since Apple acquired CUPS, they've been pushing heavily to apply their version of DNS-SD (Avahi) to networked devices. I noticed other attempts to disable print browsing on CUPS still had DNS-SD printers listed.

Try sudo service avahi-daemon stop and check the list again.

Regarding completely disabling the service, http://askubuntu.com/questions/19320/whats-the-recommended-way-to-enable-disable-services appears to be promising.
Anonymous said…
The command
sudo service avahi-daemon stop
worked for me, thanks a lot :-)
Anonymous said…
Besides disabling remote printer detection, what other consequences would disabling this service have?
Unknown said…
It's true that stopping the avahi daemon will work but you also lose all of the other functionality provided by avahi. I suspect that disabling avahi works because another service (cups-browsed) depends on avahi, so stopping avahi blocks cups-browsed.

I discovered cups-browsed while scanning through /etc/init for a solution and a web search indicated that it was very likely the culprit. It is responsible for going out on the network and finding all the printers it can locate and installs them for you (gee - thanks --NOT). So, I stopped it. However, it just restarted after the next reboot and the problem was back. A little more research and I discovered that Upstart had a feature that forces a service to be started only manually.

This may be an optimal solution to this mess. You can prevent the service from ever starting again by adding a simple text file to /etc/init that contains the single word "manual". The file must be named

"cups-browsed.override"

So, just start up gedit with sudo, put "manual" in the first and only line and save the file as:

/etc/init/cups-browsed.override

On the next Reboot, the service will not be re-started. However, you need not reboot if you've already stopped the service. Once you've placed this file in /etc/init, the service can only be started/stopped manually (if and when you need/want it) using:

sudo service cups-browsed start
-or-
sudo service cups-browsed stop`

I have tested this over a reboot. Printing still works fine and so far I do not get several hundred printers installed after the reboot. Just the ones I installed manually show up.

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