Printing with CUPS (Mac OS X up to 10.7)
Note: The CUPS version shipping with Mountain Lion 10.8 or Mavericks 10.9 no longer supports the BrowsePoll command. Please follow Printing with LPD instead.
Printing with CUPS
We announce a subset of our printers with CUPS. You can configure your computer to see the list of all available printers. This can have the shortcoming that opening the Print&Fax preference pane can be slow, as the computer needs to download the information of all the printers. Alternatively you may add specific printers by following Printing with LPD (MacOS X).
Open Terminal from /Applications/Utilities/Terminal
Run the following command (you will have to enter your local administrators password)
sudo cupsctl BrowseProtocols='"cups dnssd"'
If your computer is connected to the wired network of D-PHYS, this command is enough to see all available printers. In case you get a spinning wheel, please be patient! It may take a up to a few minutes to fetch the printer list with all the information.
Optionally, if you also want to see the printers when working on the wireless, enter
sudo cupsctl BrowsePoll=printer.phys.ethz.ch:631
- Add a printer in the printing dialogue:
The printer can be searched for and added to your system.
- The newly added printer can now be selected in the printing dialogue.
Printer configuration and state may be checked at http://printer.phys.ethz.ch/. Feel free to contact us in case you would like to add a printer to our CUPS environment.
Troubleshooting CUPS
If you experience problems with CUPS on your machine, you can force a restart of the service, by killing the cups deamon (repeat the command several times):
sudo killall -9 cupsd
Removing D-Phys CUPS configuration
If you no longer wish to print over the CUPS server of D-Phys you may run the following commands in a Terminal
sudo cupsctl BrowseProtocols='"dnssd"'
sudo cupsctl BrowsePoll=""
sudo killall -9 cupsd
If you still see the D-Phys printers in the Mac OS preference pane, you may need to delete the CUPS cache file
sudo rm /var/spool/cups/cache/remote.cache
sudo killall -9 cupsd


