Printing is Bust
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.
hello mate,
one thing i can think of is a change on the firewall configuration of the ubuntu PCs… i had this problem in the past, used to use cups quite successfully – until i installed firestarter on the print server. (you can manually open the required ports, 631 IIRC)
HTH
Just use Debian, where things are tested.
I was unable to print to my JetDirect connected LaserJet the other day – it turned out to be that it had picked up a new DHCP lease with a different IP address (must get round to giving it a fixed address).
I guess that if it was that simple the problem would also affect Windows and OSX, but perhaps they’re using vendor-supplied drivers that identify the printer on the network by name or ID rather than just by IP address.
I have a HP 2605dn network printer which sometmes (maybe three times this year) will not print from Ubuntu 9.04. A quick fix is to power cycle the printer. I don’t think this is a HP issue because I don’t have this problem with Windows. I don’t remember this being an issue under Ubutnu 8.10.
I recently had a problem where a printer decided it wanted to stop printing duplex with one of my systems. With a friend we tried an identical printer, checked the ram in the printer before swapping the JetDirect cards (both HP4250s). Both printers then worked… We swapped them back and the problem reoccurred.
Also do you have a hard disk in your network printer? Could be worth making sure it’s ok…
Sometimes CUPS decides to be helpful and quietly *disables* printing on a printer that it cannot connect to for a few seconds. You won’t be printing *anything* until you manually run cupsenable (or do the equivalent using CUPS’s web UI).
Tim: ha ha ha ha ha. CUPS on my Debian server has been doing this trick for years, I even had to write a cron script to periodically run cupsenable when it noticed stuck jobs in the queue. Now that machine is replaced by a Ubuntu server, and CUPS is still occasionally acting up. (Although, to be fair, the last time this happened it *was* a DHCP issue, and kicking the printer fixed that.)
Did you ever figure out the underlying problem?