Installed printer asks for cups root password but it does not work

English Hardware
1

I skipped root creation on the install and just use my account as admin,
I installed my Brother printer drivers from the brother website and rebooted.
When I try to access the printer under system settings I keep getting a pop up from CUPS asking for my root password. The password never works?

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2

You can try this:

sudo -i

This should give you a root command line. And then, as root,

passwd root

should allow you to set a password for root.

Note that I have not tested this in Leap 16.0

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3

If you did not set a root password during installation, then you cannot authenticate as root.

Leap 16.0 requires you specifically elect to set a root password at install time, as I recall.

4

That seemed to work. I entered the new password in the CUPS root popup and it went away.

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5

The first user created during the installation with Agama is automatically added to the wheel group which is configured in the sudo configuration to get root privileges. This works for the sudo command, but not necessarily for everything else.

This also means that you can also set a root password directly as that user with

sudo passwd root

But if any application insists on root privileges without using sudo, membership in the wheel user group might still not be enough.

See also Chapter 3. Granting administration permissions to manage a CUPS server in the web interface | Configuring and using a CUPS printing server | Red Hat Enterprise Linux | 9 | Red Hat Documentation

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6

It should also work for polkit (meaning - user needs to authenticate as himself, not as root).

7

For CUPS, admin access is controlled by the configuration in cupsd.conf eg

<Location /admin>
  AuthType Default
  Require user @SYSTEM
  Order allow,deny
</Location>

The @SYSTEM group here maps to the SystemGroup directive defined in cups-files.conf, which specifies which groups are considered CUPS administrators.

~> sudo grep SystemGroup /etc/cups/cups-files.conf
SystemGroup root

You can change this list to delegate admin access to other users if needed.

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8

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