Cups Web Admin Interface (was: Dependence on Gnome's System Menu)

[Rocco Stanzione]

I originally brought this up as part of a discussion on the practice of 
removing or crippling existing, reliable tools that many users are 
comfortable with in favor of pointing users to the appropriate Gnome 
interface.  I was admonished to address the specific issues instead.

If I run CUPS, I can visit http://localhost:631 and poke around a bit, but I 
can't do anything useful.  Specifically, the Admin functions are deliberately 
disabled.  A message at the top of the page lets me know this and points me 
to a Gnome interface which, not being a Gnome user, I don't have.  It was 
suggested that this was disabled due to a policy of having no running 
servers.  Does such a policy really exist?  If so, does crippling the 
functionality of the CUPS web service satisfy this policy?  If the answer to 
both questions is Yes, I'd like to suggest that we need a new 
desktop-independent printer administration interface.  KDE's kcontrol has an 
applet similar to Gnome's, but it doesn't work very well and a lot of users 
use neither KDE nor Gnome.  The solution I'm suggesting, though, is to leave 
cupsd.conf more or less as it is in Debian's package, where the admin 
interface is available to any member of the lpadmin group and the web 
interface listens only on localhost (as it does in the Ubuntu package).

Thanks,

Rocco Stanzione