Tired of screwing around with CUPS

[notgeekenough]

I am having a lot of issues with CUPS and it is really getting annoying.
I had CUPS working and then it stopped. When I look at the error log on the server I'm getting an error about raw printing but in both mime.types and mime.convs I've uncommented the correct lines. Can anyone tell me what is up with this? Or better yet is there an alternative to sharing a printer between windows and linux clients? This is not the first issue I've had with CUPS.

Thanks

[Dapper Dan]

I have two Linux machines and one Windows box printing to a Linux Cups server and have had similar issues. Almost always, it's the Windows machine that suddenly unlearns how to access the print server. In most cases, if I delete the printer in Windows and re-make it, it starts working again. Are the problems coming from the Windows machine(s) or Linux machine(s) or both? Can you post the pertinent sections of your cups error log?

[notgeekenough]

Here is my error_log

E [30/Nov/2008:10:46:06 -0700] print_job: Unsupported format 'application/octet-stream'!
I [30/Nov/2008:10:46:06 -0700] Hint: Do you have the raw file printing rules enabled?

This happens from both my linux and windows machines.

Thanks for the reply

[Dapper Dan]

Your exact error messages with a probable solution can be found here just about half way down. Try the suggested remedy and see if it fixes things for you.

[notgeekenough]

Thanks but I've already done that in both mime.types and mime.convs and I'm still getting the error. Everything was working fine and then I started to getting that error. I checked both files and they were uncommented.

[Dapper Dan]

Dumb question, did you restart cups daemon after you made the changes?

[notgeekenough]

Even dumber answer. No I did not restart, after restarting cups, it worked. Which brings me to another question. My server was updated and restarted. After restart the mime.types file raw line was commented out. So I uncommented it again which brought to me to this point of forgetting to restart cups. This has happened to me before, why is the mime.types file getting put back to the original state, i.e with the raw line commented out. I have to do this most time that the server restarts but not all.

[Dapper Dan]

Are you using system-config-printer? It will "re-comment" the line about octet-stream upon saving. If you are, it would be best to not use it and edit the file by hand. That may be why this keeps happening to you.

[notgeekenough]

no, editing by hand. I also noticed the mime.types.rpmnew which is a recent file, this had the line commented. I uncommented this as a well which didn't help either.