Cups Print Server on Raspberry Pi Timeouts

A few months ago the HP printer my parents were using quit working due to a driver issue. It seems that it is old enough that Apple as well as Microsoft pulled some kind of automatic AirPrint driver discovery deal which rendered the thing useless. For a while they were able to still print from their phones but no desktop computer in the house felt like talking to it anymore.
Given that I do computers, and are seemingly also stupid and refuse to learn from my mistakes, I was convinced I could help them nurse this deal along until the newly acquired ink cartridges were all used up. I did what any self-respecting nerd would do and hooked up yet another Raspberry Pi up to their network and installed the phenomenal cups printing server on it.
I was indeed able to revitalize the printer, at least for a little bit. It kept on seemingly “disconnecting” or “timing-out” after a handful of days without any errors in any logs. I tried to fix it with all kinds of various solutions. I disabled all the power saving modes, tried to come up with all kinds of rain dances in order for my parents to help themselves. As you may already guess, none of it worked.

Just now while fiddling with it again I was presented by an interesting error message in macOS in which it told me that it could discover the printer but not actually connect to the device raspberrypi.local. I was convinced that I had changed the hostname on the device but apparently not well enough as our router was also still convinced that there were multiple local devices with the hostname raspberrypi.local. At this point it hit me that AirPrint relies entirely on Bonjour or LAN/local discovery! If you have more than one host with the same hostname in the network there is a namespace collision and it might work, or it might not, or who knows what kind of cursed undefined and seemingly undocumented behavior any given implementation decides to follow through with.

Logged into Raspberry Pi OS I entered sudo raspi-config and changed the hostname to cups, installed updates while I was already in there and rebooted the host. Once the Pi was responding on the network again I checked macOS which immediately advertised a new HP printer with a @ cups suffix. Trying to setup the printer also worked first try without any issues.

TLDR: make sure that if you want to reliably run the cups printing server on a Raspberry Pi that you give it a unique hostname within your network.

Somehow it is the year 2025 and we’re still partying (😭) like it is 1994. Linux on the “desktop” to the rescue, I hope that this will be my last battle with this system

16.06.2025