I had troubles making the web interface in ubuntu 4.10 work.

Whatever I set in cupsd.conf, I had an access denied message:

UnauthorizedAdministrative commands are disabled in the web interface for
security reasons. Please use the GNOME CUPS manager (Computer > System
configuration > Printing).

In /var/log/auth.log the following message appeared:

Dez 17 13:05:34 localhost cupsd: (pam_unix) authentication failure; logname=
uid=0 euid=0 tty= ruser= rhost= user=nictuku

Also, in /var/log/cups/error_log I had:

E [17/Dec/2004:13:05:50 -0200] IsAuthorized: pam_authenticate() returned 7
(Authentication failure)!

The solution is quite simple. Just change the /etc/cups/cupsd.conf and set the daemon user to root: Put “User root” in the file. Then restart cupsys.

Obviously this is a security no-no, but one should have the freedom to do whatever he wants, right? :)

Seriously, Ubuntu disabled that for a reason. It’s bad to log in as root using plain http authentication. In some cases, though, the web interface is required.

In my home server I don’t run X, so I can’t use the gnome cups control panel. Also, in general network servers, you could use an ssh tunnel to login to the cups interface. In that case, I suggest you to keep 127.0.0.1 as the only listening interface, for better security.

Archived Comments

THANK YOU!!!

Anonymous - Feb 1, 2008

THANK YOU!!!