I hope this is the correct place to report this. It does not concern the cups version in the distribution itself. I switched to the printing repository because of another bug in the distribution.

Since sometime in late 2021, printing via cups started to fail. Printers are discovered with cups-browsed and are provided with two dedicated cups servers, one on each of two sites.

Discovery and printer administration failed with error messages like "....: read only filesystem". I am not sure, if printing itself worked, since I could not add printers manually.

I only got to investigate this further lately. Is seems for security reasons described in https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Security_Features#Systemd_hardening_effort, a number of security flags were added to cups' systemd .service file, including "ProtectSystem=full", which makes all of /etc read-only for the cups daemon. To add printers and I think autodiscovery does this as well, cups/cups-browsed write files to /etc/cups/ppd and modify /etc/cups/printers.conf. Those operations are prohibited with the above "ProtectSystem=full".

I solved this by modifying by adding ReadWritePaths=/etc/cups to both units. This might not be the "Minimal write access" solution. Maybe it would be enough to allow writing only for some of the content of /etc/cups (like printers.conf and ppd). Also I am not completely sure, if cups-browsed needs the access itself of uses lpadmin internally.