# [Solved] CUPS admin won't accept root passphrase

## djanderson

Hi there,

I just set up CUPS following gentoo's documentation, but didn't get very far. I put the localhost:631 URL into firefox and CUPS admin page came up. I clicked on "Do Admin Tasks" as the documentation says to, and put in "root" and my root password, but it just comes back up and asks for it again.

After a little playing around, I realized that the problem seems to be that I'm using a passphrase for my root password which includes spaces and punctuation, etc. I guessed that firefox's password dialog was stripping the non-letter/number characters out of the password, so I changed my root password temporarily to a simpler one, and was able to log in and do admin tasks.

Regardless of the fact that I found a workaround, I think it's a bug, maybe in firefox, and I don't want to have to change my root password every time I want to do admin tasks to my printer, so I guess there's two solutions which I hope someone can help me with.

One is to somehow change some settings and get firefox/cups admin to allow a passphrase to be used.

Two is to allow my normal user account (which doesn't use a passphrase) to administer CUPS. I imagine this is the easier solution, but I have very little experience w/ user/group settings. I created a new group named "cups" and added my user to it, but as I expected, nothing happened ^_^ I'm sure I have to assocate that group w/ the CUPS admin program or something... 

Any help is greatly appreciated!

-DougLast edited by djanderson on Mon Feb 13, 2006 3:23 am; edited 1 time in total

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## ectospasm

This is a long shot, but you can try putting %20 (or whatever the code is for spaces) for every space in your password.  And just save the password so you don't have to retype it.  Of course, you'll need to make sure the physical security to your machine is good, and that you use a locking screen saver (or at least lock the workstation somehow).

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## djanderson

 *ectospasm wrote:*   

> This is a long shot, but you can try putting %20 (or whatever the code is for spaces) for every space in your password.  And just save the password so you don't have to retype it.  Of course, you'll need to make sure the physical security to your machine is good, and that you use a locking screen saver (or at least lock the workstation somehow).

 

Thanks for the quick reply ectospasm. I didn't try out your suggestion because I'm a little wary of having a big-ass passphrase just to save it in firefox. Why be only half-way paranoid, ya know?  :Smile: 

I did fix the problem however by browsing through the cupsd.conf file for a while and finding out that there is already a group name set for the cups called "lp". It didn't show up in gnome's user/group admin program before which is why I didn't try it, but I then clicked on "show all groups and users" and sure enough the group "lp" showed up. I just added my normal user to that group and everything works fine.

Still wonder if maybe firefox mutilating passphrases is a bug that should be reported? I checked mozilla bugzilla in "OS integration" and "general" and couldn't find any already filed bugs, but I suck at bug reports... every time I file one it turns out it's already there and I get repremanded for not searching and get marked a dupe  :Sad:  Anybody else think this is a bug or what?

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