No, I don't mean unicode on slashdot. We know this site will shutter before that ever happens.
I'm talking about printer discovery in Ubuntu. I suspect this is more than an Ubuntu thing, it likely is a CUPS thing in general when attempting to deal with Bonjour.
I recently installed a new Ubuntu release on my laptop after some updates had turned the previous install into a nonworking pile of smoldering rubble. I bought a new SSD and installed on there, so I wouldn't have any remnants of anything to worry about. Things seemed great, until I went to set up my printer.
At this point of course I should
reference the great comic strip on printers from The Oatmeal , essentially everything he mentions in there applies to this printer. Really the only good thing I can say about my current printer is that my employer bought it for me; I wish I would have had some say in which model though.
To the point, discovering printers couldn't be easier. Localhost:631, Admin, etc
... Except it then sets up a printer that you can't actually
use. Every recent version of Ubuntu sets up the "discovered" printers such that jobs will all error out with "unable to find the printer". Yes I've searched google for this. It seems to be something with nss-mdns, and how that tells your system to go about finding things.
Except when it isn't, of course. I installed the expected libraries, and edited nsswitch.conf. I restarted CUPS, then I restarted my PC. I of course rebooted the printer as well. None of that made a difference at all.
Finally I said to hell with it. I checked the IP address for the printer, and changed the configuration to
socket://192.168.1.142:9100
And now it works fine. I had to manually pick the driver but that was a small tradeoff. Yes, that is a static address in my network so it should "just work" from there. We'll see how long that printer decides that is OK before it throws a fit and discards its settings.