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).

  1. Open Terminal from /Applications/Utilities/Terminal

  2. 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
  1. Add a printer in the printing dialogue:

printingosx_1.jpg

The printer can be searched for and added to your system.

printingosx_2.jpg

  1. The newly added printer can now be selected in the printing dialogue.

printingosx_3.jpg

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