I went to the local print shop today.  It turns out that they are switching to Linux.  I asked why and they said “because we hate Microsoft”.

“Great,” I thought.  So I told them I worked at Red Hat… blank stares.  Elyn asked what distro they’re installing (way to go Elyn!) and they said Kubuntu — which, I learned, is cool because it has a Japanese name.

I made a comment about Shuttleworth being an astronaut.  More blank stares… this kind of thing is funnier at OSCON.

Today I finally set up my printer so that Elyn can print from her laptop. This turned into a long struggle and now I remember why I quit being a sysadmin.

First I made a little hole in the firewall so her Mac could access the appropriate ports. This actually is fairly easy — just a config option in a GUI somewhere.

This wasn’t enough, though. It turns out that the default CUPS setup here (I’m using FC4 on this box) needed to have ServerName 192.xx.xx.xx added to it. Without this the Mac seemed to think that the CUPS server was on 127.0.0.1.

During all of this I messed with the Mac config a bit too. At one point I got the cryptic message: get_printer_attrs: resource name '/' no good. Most of the google hits for this seem to be people asking about it but not finding an answer. My fix was simple: delete the printer I had added by hand and have the Mac re-scan for printers. The bug here seems to be that a printer added by hand has a path of ‘/’, where actually it should be something like ‘/printers/Pravda’.