• The portreserve problem: is systemd the solution?

    Quite a while ago I wrote portreserve, a utility to prevent ports getting stolen at boot time by portmap. This would happen with CUPS, for example: portmap starts first (to allow for NFS-mounted filesystems), and calls bindresvport(). If the privileged (i.e. in the range 512-1023) port it allocates happens to be 631, when CUPS starts…

  • CUPS 1.6 changes ahead

    As I mentioned elsewhere, there are some changes ahead in CUPS 1.6. These changes are not imminent but give an indication of the direction the CUPS project is heading. Back in 2007 CUPS became an Apple project.  Now the parts that are not relevant on Mac OS are being dropped, with some of the Linux-relevant…

  • CUPS disabled on upgrade to Fedora 16

    One common bug that people are running into with Fedora 16 is that CUPS is no longer enabled after upgrade from an earlier version of Fedora (fresh installs are unaffected). This has already been reported in Bugzilla, and a test update is available. There is also an Ask Fedora answer about it.

  • Printing Test Day

    It’s that time again.  Fedora 16’s Printing Test Day is tomorrow, Thursday October 6th.  Come along and help make printing work better on Fedora! The Test Day page has instructions on what you need and how to test.

  • D-Bus and Python: asynchronous method implementation

    This is a quick demonstration of how to implement a D-Bus method in Python using asynchronous callbacks. I recently added support in system-config-printer for determining the best driver to use for a particular printer.  This is an expensive operation, largely because of the time it takes to get a list of available drivers from CUPS,…