DoctorMo's Blog

Some times you have good days, and other times you have bad days. Today was bad.

At the SETC where we are attempting to put together (slowly) a Lab with various technologies we have lost printing. We don’t know why printing has decided all of a sudden to take a leap off a building from every Ubuntu computer, and all of the Windows or Macs can still print. there in lies the mystery.

On Wednesday 23rd September the Minolta C350 network printer at the SETC was known to work from every one of the Ubuntu machines. It had a global configuration which was set centrally. Then the following Thursday, no one could print anything.

The problem is prints say they are being processed, but actually just drop down a black hole. that is after spending 12 minutes in the queue “processing”. The error longs point to some kind of error returned from lpr and perhaps some kind of connection error.

But this is madness because cups is able to get good status reports and everything is automatically configured.

It could be blamed on some update which could have theoretically killed it, but shouldn’t there be other companies with the same problem? It could be some printer setting “Turn off Ubuntu support” but I don’t think this printer has that option available.

I’d get logs up here tomorrow. Lets just say that Ubuntu lost a lot of reputation this week in this community center, and we don’t even know why. How annoying.