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

[Rocco Stanzione]

On Thursday 23 February 2006 03:38, Martin Pitt wrote:
> Hi Rocco!
>
> Rocco Stanzione [2006-02-22 15:53 -0600]:
> > 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?
>
> That's not quite correct; of course we do have running servers. The
> policy is to have no open ports to the outside world by default.
>
> > If so, does crippling the functionality of the CUPS web service
> > satisfy this policy?
>
> No, the disabling of the admin functionality was just a precautionary
> means to disallow access to /etc/shadow for cups. The message says
>
>   "/usr/share/doc/cupsys/README.Debian.gz describes the details and
>   how to reenable it again."
>
> and there you will find "sudo adduser cupsys shadow".
>
> Martin

Thanks Martin for this explanation.  I can certainly understand not wanting 
CUPS to have access to /etc/shadow.  It's a much better answer than I've been 
getting on irc and elsewhere on the list.  I suspect there's a better 
solution than disabling the functionality of the admin interface, but since I 
don't know what that might be right now I'll shut up until I come up with 
some thing better.