Scribbled on Saturday the 21st of February, 2026.

Ubuntu
Updates ate my printer
Software Updater
Apparmor
CUPSD
cups-browserd
Feb 2026
dmesg



  How to fix broken printing after an Ubuntu update (Feb 2026)
  ============================================================

  It's February the 21st 2026.  Right in the middle of Tax season
  (luvverly!).  First thing this morning, Ubuntu Software Manager lets me
  know there are some updates pending, including security-related ones.
  Well, we'd better get those slapped in before some dastardly hacker
  makes off with my tax returns, eh!  Couple of minutes and it's finished;
  doesn't even need a reboot.  Okay on with our exciting day then.

  And yes, right in the middle of Tax season, both of the bloody printers
  (which were working as well as they usually work yesterday) refuse to
  spit out my all-important-on-a-deadline-here documents.  Absolutely
  typical!  Still, it can't be too difficult, can it?  All I have to do
  is check to see what was updated this morning and then un-update it.

  Probably something related to cups or systemd I expect.  I throw a
  quick "find /etc -mtime -1 -ls" at it and nothing much comes back,
  barring some twaddle to do with "cloud" (where did that come from?
  I thought cloud was one of Tiny-Shiny-Home's dogs).  Anyway /etc/cloud
  has tons of files full of "%" characters splattered all over the place
  --  best leave that well alone, whatever the heck it is.

  Not getting particularly agitated yet (well, nothing above the
  normal Tax-season gnashing of teeth level, anyway), I politely ask
  dmesg to tell me what has come its way this morning, to be greeted
  by the usual meaningless barrage of apparmor messages (not quite as
  bad as %-splatter, but it still might just as well be cuneiform).
  No, wait!  There in the dogs dinner is some legible text and it spells
  out r-e-s-o-l-v-.-c-o-n-f.  Ahah Watson! It's a clue!  No, it's bloody
  DNS again.  It's always DNS (even Cloud knows that!).

  I wandered round and round this pile of steaming for a while,
  trying to work out what in the update had done for my resolv.conf
  link (cos' it's not actually a file any longer, is it?  If you
  leave it as a file, everybody and his three-legged dog fiddles
  around with it all the time ...so I cleverly link it to
  /etc/WHY_DONT_YOU_ALL_NAFF_OFF to try and stem the fiddling flow).
  Anyhoo, it seems that apparmor is objecting to my link (or maybe
  the original file, who knows?), and as I -still- can't find what
  the actual trigger was, I decide to weasel-out (as usual) and ask
  it nicely to stop faffing me around.  I know absolutely B.A. about
  apparmor (except that it's yet another constant PITA nowadays!),
  but I struggle on with a quick edit of /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.cupsd,
  adding

		/etc/resolv.conf rl,
		/etc/WHY_DONT_YOU_ALL_NAFF_OFF rl,

  into that huge long list of something-or-another and hoping it
  would do the trick.  Of curse it didn't (typo, what typo???).  So
  I repeated the same performance with
  /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.cups-browserd and, for good measure,
  restarted cupsd and apparmor as well.  At this point, one of the
  printers (the one which I -hadn't- been mucking about with when
  everything stopped working) sprang back into life.  Yay! Break out
  the Newkie-Broon!

  The other one resolutely refused to be cajoled back from its stupor
  until I power-cycled it, deleted and then re-inserted it into the
  printer configuration tool and then hit it wth half a brick.

  Bottom line  - It's always DNS!  Everybody (and his three-legged dog)
  knows that.  Oh, and I didn't copyright WHY_DONT_YOU_ALL_NAFF_OFF, so
  please do feel free to use it for your own resolv.conf file if you
  want to.