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After upgrading from Ubuntu 13.04 to 14.04 the system printing dialog shows printers I never installed:

enter image description here

"Farblaser" and "Laser" are printers I installed, the other two show up out of nowhere. Neither the CUPS web interface nor system-config-printer shows them, even with View/Discovered Printers enabled. Browsing Off is already in the CUPS config file. Printing dialogs other than the system one, e.g. Libreoffice (sic), don't show them either.

As it turns out, these are two network printers in our LAN. I can send print jobs to them, even though printing a PDF from evince results in the the PDF binary being printed -- ouch.

Following this answer, it's clear where the printer names come from; avahi-browse -a | grep Printer finds our network printers and assigns them IDs of the form [BDxxxx] which match the printer names (which I partly blurred out).

Disabling a whole service with multiple uses seems like overkill. How can I disable this behaviour of the printing dialog?

Community
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Raphael
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  • possible duplicate of How do I disable automatic remote printer installation? – Barafu Albino Aug 05 '14 at 09:44
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    @BarafuAlbino I never experienced this behaviour with 13.04. The answers seem mostly ineffective, too; the issue does not seem to be with CUPS. avahi-browse seems to be a good lead; the device IDs is shows are BDxxxx, exactly the suffixes used in the printing dialog. However, just shutting the service down is clearly suboptimal. So my question stands and is unanswered: how to disable this behaviour of the printing dialog? – Raphael Aug 05 '14 at 09:50
  • I think printing dialog only shows what it gets from CUPS, however I can't be sure anymore - Ubuntu gets overcomplicated with every new release. – Barafu Albino Aug 05 '14 at 09:58
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    @BarafuAlbino How can it come from CUPS if no other interface shows them? (No offense, but have you read the question, in particular the part below the picture?) – Raphael Aug 05 '14 at 10:55
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    I can confirm this problem. If you are on a network with self-announcing printers, on 14.04, (some of?) those printers show automatically up in the print dialog (at least of Xubuntu and Kubuntu). Stopping cups-browsed prevents cups from adding those printers, but still, they show up in the print dialog. So yes, this is not a cups problem. The problem is resolved by stopping avahi-deamon, which is not optimal. We need a solution which keeps avahi-deamon alive, but stops the print dialog from displaying those printers. – azimut Dec 09 '14 at 11:01
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    What the f .... I still see this problem with my 16.04 ... and worse: one can delete printers ... to watch them come back after 5 seconds. – GhostCat Nov 08 '16 at 10:13

1 Answers1

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As stopping the avahi-daemonor inserting enable-dbus=nointo the avahi-daemon.conf did not help (16.04), we disabled the daemon on the interface which points to the network where the printers reside by adding deny-interfaces=<interface>to the [server] section of the config-file.

We could only do it because we do not need any avahi functionality there.

DaveMcBrave
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