Mysterious Ghost Printer - Printer Rejecting Jobs

Back in 2017 a mysterious ghost printer appeared, with the caption that it was rejecting jobs. See the image below.

After much research, I found the solution for getting rid of the ghost printer in the following post: How do I get rid of a ghost printer in Gnome?

The reason for publishing this post is that a new version of "avahi" was released this April (2018) which overwrote the "/etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf" file. This recreated the problem of the ghost printer. Fortunately, I remembered how to resolve this problem. But tweaks, after a period of time has elapsed, are easily forgotten.  Finding the solution again can be frustrating and time consuming. Hence this post. Below is my addition to "/etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf" file as recommended in the post cited above to eliminate the ghost printer.

#----------------
#modified 6/27/2017
#https://askubuntu.com/questions/676863/how-do-i-get-rid-of-a-ghost-printer-in-gnome/70021
#restart service with; sudo service avahi-daemon restart
enable-dbus=no
#----------------

Note: Prior to overwriting the "/etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf", the "avahi" upgrade does ask for permission. I let it overwrite the file as I wanted to see if the new version may have resolved the ghost printer problem. It did not.

Also when adding tweaks, I tend to add comments that identify where the tweak originated, other useful comments, and the date it was inserted.

I am also using Ubuntu 16.04, so I don't know if this ghost printer problem exists in other Linux distributions.

Update (March 32, 2020): Turned out there were unintended negative consequences with the solution posted above. I accidentally discovered that when I happened to examine the /var/log/syslog file.  That file showed two errors related to avahi: "avahi-daemon.service: Failed with result 'timeout'." and "Failed to start Avahi mDNS/DNS-SD Stack.". Removing the line "enable-dbus=no" eliminated those error messages, but the ghost printer, as shown at the top of this page, has returned. I have elected to "live" with the ghost printer over having error messages in the /var/log/syslog file. Sometimes you can't win.

Update (July 7, 2020):  Turned out that a modification to the /etc/samba/smb.conf filte resolved the ghost printer issue.  Please see this post by altair4: Samba and Mint20, for a full explanation. The short version:

[1] Override the default setting of Samba and reinstate SMB1 ( Samba calls it NT1 ) on all your Linux machines.

Edit /etc/samba/smb.conf and right under the workgroup = WORKGROUP line add these:

Code: Select all

client min protocol = NT1
server min protocol = NT1

Then reboot your box.