http://...:631/admin/ sometimes asks for password even when configured not to

[archenemies]

I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to get CUPS to allow admin access to hosts on the local network. It seemed to me that the changes I was making in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf were not having an immediate or permanent effect. Finally I got it working, that was a few weeks ago. Today I clicked on the "Administration" tab and was prompted for a username and password. When I ran

sudo systemctl restart org.cups.cupsd.service

and reloaded the page in the browser, I no longer had to enter a password. Any ideas what's going on here?

[michaelrsweet]

I will add a NOTE that you MUST MUST MUST restart cupsd manually after making changes directly to cupsd.conf. This is how 99.99% of all server software works, but OK I'll make it explicit.

[archenemies]

I'm sorry, I left out that I was restarting cupsd during my initial experimentation. Like you, I thought that was implied. (It might still be good to make this explicit in cupsd.conf(5) though)

More recently when I was asked for my password (while my cupsd.conf has for many weeks been configured to not require a password) I hadn't even made any changes. And I don't think anyone else did either; the only other possible source of changes that I could think of would have been the package manager, but the current version of cupsd.conf is the same as what I had before, and it is different from the package default.

I know this isn't much to work with, if one were to try and debug this. It could be that I'm doing something stupid, or it could be that something else is interfering. But something strange is happening, and to me, right now, it seems like a CUPS bug.

Maybe you could recommend some things I could do to gather information the next time the problem occurs...? Is it possible to get CUPS to spit out the configuration file that it thinks it is currently using?

[michaelrsweet]

The only thing I can recommend to look for is a) the current and previous cupsd.conf files, and b) see if the cupsd process has, in fact, been restarted (new PID).

[michaelrsweet]

[master ee347e1] Add note about restarting the scheduler manually after editing config files (Issue #5402)