Some of our customers are using central CUPS systems for managing their printer infrastructure. In the last years the demand for support printing (called Airprint) from mobile apple products increased. This worked well for us on Debian squeeze as documented here (updated scrips).
I tried this on a fresh installed Debian wheezy amd64, but no printer was found on any IOS device.
Hmm .... let's see if the printer is announces via avahi:
$ avahi-browse -a | grep -i print
+ eth0 IPv6 Kyocera FS-1020D @ service Internet Printer local
+ eth0 IPv6 AirPrint Kyocera @ service Internet Printer local
+ eth0 IPv4 Kyocera FS-1020D @ service Internet Printer local
+ eth0 IPv4 AirPrint Kyocera @ service Internet Printer local
WTF?!? Fortunately we have an Ubuntu 12.04 running in our office and printing from IOS devices works without problems (without copying any files to /etc/avahi/services/):
$ avahi-browse -a | grep -i print
+ eth2 IPv6 Ricoh Aficio MP C2800 @ printing Internet Printer local
+ eth2 IPv6 Ricoh Aficio MP 171 @ printing Internet Printer local
+ eth2 IPv4 Ricoh Aficio MP 171 @ printing Internet Printer local
+ eth2 IPv4 Ricoh Aficio MP C2800 @ printing Internet Printer local
I just copied the whole configuration over to my wheezy system, but it didn't worked out. I tried this all on a kfreebsd-i386 system again without success. Sorry, but I don't understand the source of this issue. Cups on wheezy has the same upstream version as on precise. Avahi-daemon on wheezy is just one minor version ahead off precise. Is this a bug/incompatibility in cups and/or avahi? A missing patch compared to the packages of precise? Is this a configuration problem?
Update: Looking into LP #1054495 and the debdiff of cups 1.5.3-0ubuntu6 indicates, that there seems modifications beside simple changes of mime configurations files.
Update: The fix for LP #1054495 does really fix the problem on wheezy too. With the help of Didier Raboud I was able test a binary package with this fixapplied on our test setup. The good news is, there are no extra modifications needed beside just configuring cups to export it's printers for enabling support for iOS devices. I opened #700961 and hopefully release managment will accept this fix for wheezy.
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