[X4U] i need help w/ cups printing

[Hector Luna]

I needed to add a printer to my iBook (10.4.2, 1.3 GHz G4, 1.25GB).
The printer was connected to my XP computer at work. It is an HP 4100
dtn that is currently bereft of its internal jet direct card. I have
it connected locally to my XP computer via the parallel port. There
are other network printers in the building, but this was the only
duplex one and I needed to add it.

I found a hint on macosxhints.com, but for the life of me can't find
the actual doc at the moment. It worked, and I was able to print my
docs that day. It involved turning on printer sharing, aliasing cupsd
(i think) in the Terminal window and using the CUPS gui interface
through my browser. I defined a printer, used the FQDN for my XP
machine in the URI and a few minutes later I was printing.

The problem now is that all of my printers are hosed and I can't use
any of them. They might work once I get back on my corporate LAN, the
ones in the building at any rate. All told I have about a dozen
installed for use at work, home and school. When I look at the printer
utility window I see the host defined for all the printers. I don't
remember ever seeing the host defined in that window before. I cross
referenced my B&W tower (10.3.9, 500MHz G3, 1GB) and my wife's iBook
(10.4.2, 700MHz G3, 648MB) and neither of those have anything in the
host field in the printer utility window. The problem, as near as I
can tell is the host name:  hspc157449.px.snds.com. I know what the
domain suffix is, that's the domain suffix for my corporate LAN. I
don't know what the hspc157449 name is exactly, but I think it has
something to do with our DNS server, a Lucent QIP server. When I
configure addresses in the QIP tool I often see something similar
before a host name is defined for an address. I know that it is not
the name of my XP machine, that's AB868703, and not the Samba name for
my iBook, that's Loki.

I"ve looked in cupsd.conf, client.conf and printers.conf and
hostconfig and can't find any traces of the hspc host name. I've
deleted and readded my home printer, connected to an external jet
direct print server, but the song, err, host remained the same. I've
looked at the help files for the print setup utility and it would only
say that the host field "displays the name of the computer that's
"hosting" or sharing the printer."

I'm at wits end. Does anyone have any suggestions. At this point I am
perfectly happy wiping out all of the defined printers and re-adding
them as need arises. Any help would be appreciated.

--
Someday, when the historians study how someone as accomplished as Al
Gore was effectively marginalized by a party without a conscience and
kept press, they're going to be amazed that any of us had opposable
thumbs.
- Charles Pierce