Why is printers.conf suddenly empty in RHEL 7

Solution Verified - Updated -

Issue

  • /etc/cups/printers.conf file from CUPS client got empty on its own and we had production outage as all the printers configured on system were wiped out. We want to know what caused this issue.
  • All our enabled printers where deleted with the following message in the access_log

    [25/Feb/2020:05:47:48 +0000] "POST /admin/ HTTP/1.1" 401 154 CUPS-Delete-Printer successful-ok
    

    The CUPS service is listening only on 127.0.0.1 so no remote access to the browser. Is there a way to find out how or why this happened?

  • When a client loses connectivity to the CUPS master server, printers are removed from the CUPS configuration files.

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7
  • Common Unix Printing System (CUPS)
  • cups-browsed service running to automatically create print queues shared from a central print server

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