As I've already reported, I've had a very annoying problem of my HP Photosmart C4380 over WiFi not printing.

Now I finally got it to work!

Update: a better solution …was my fault really.

The real problem seems to be that CUPS doesn't support pure Avahi yet. In fact support for Avahi (and Bonjour over it) is planned for the 1.5 branch, but only mDNSresponder. Meaning that CUPS and HPLIP just couldn't understand eachother where the printer is located. Althought Zeroconf (Avahi being its most prominent and FOSS solution) is a great thing, it's pretty annoying when you get used to it and it fails …in my case: forgetting to run avahi-daemon.

So there's two solution now.

Avahi with mDNSresponder support¶

After Jason reminded me in the comments about Avahi working, I started playing around a bit and, yes it works.

What's more, I got it working without editing any config files.

What I forgot is that you need to have to run Avahi daemon in order for it to work.

So with a simple:

# /etc/init.d/avahi-daemon start
# rc-update add avahi-daemon default

it works.

Since HPLIP uses mDNSresponder you can either:

• install Avahi with USE="mdnsresponder-compat"; or
• for a pure Avahi system see if Jason's way works. (sorry, dead link)

Using SLP instead of Zeroconf/Avahi¶

This trick is pretty simple – use static IP instead.

What I did was add the printer as normal with hp-setup and then in CUPS' web interface changed the Connection URI to hp:/net/Photosmart_C4380_series?ip=192.168.1.101. Just change the IP accordingly. You can get your printer's IP by different methods – with hp-probe, on your router, or by accessing the settings from the small LCD of the printer itself. I imagine people who use the hp-setup GUI can just select the SLP discovery method to do the same automatically.

I'm still not 100% happy with the fact that it happened, and am not sure that was the only problem I had …but at least it works again and Avahi support is planned.

hook out → off to bed…