New subject: printing problems

5 Jan 2021

      [sorry my mistake not copying the support list the first time]

On Mon, Jan 04, 2021 at 08:35:39PM -0500, Doug McGarrett wrote:
...
On 1/4/21 5:35 PM, Daniel Morris wrote:
...
Hi Doug,
On Mon, Jan 04, 2021 at 04:00:42PM -0500, Doug McGarrett wrote:
...
Have two printers--HP and Epson--which were both working. Was looking at
a pdf in Okular, and tried to print it using the little printer icon in the
panel. It
showed four items in the print queue, which I can't account for, but I think
I got rid of them with the options available. Would not print. Tried the
other
printer, same routine, won't print. Now tried printing with each printer
from
a text in Kate. Neither printer will print. No error message. The Epson has
a
scanner function, and that still works.
Maybe there are jobs stuck in the queues or something's gone wobbly with
a filter.
$ lpq -a
will show all the print queues and maybe give you a hint
and as it sounds like you've already found you can cancel individual
and bulk jobs using the 'cancel' command
But the easiest way is usually to connect to your own machine and look
at what CUPS thinks is going on. Just launch a browser and connect to
port 631 on your machine by entering this into the address bar:
localhost:631
You might be prompted to login with the root password to that page.
Usually you can navigate at the top of the page to "Printers" and "Jobs"
to work out what's going on.
I guess you'll probably have two print queues setup, one for the Epson &
one for the HP. In the "Printers" tab see what the "Status" field says.
If you click on the name of the print queue, you'll have two drop-downs
for "Maintenance" & "Administration". Sometimes you might just need to
"Resume" a printer (under Maintenance) if it had a temporary fault, such
as out of paper, jammed or a door open etc. I think the default config
waits for an admin to intervene if there's a fault - logical in a
big/corporate setup but quite irritating when the printer is sat at the
other end of your desk and you can see it ran out of paper and now have
to launch a browser and login and tell CUPS to tell the printer to
resume.
Resist making changes under Administration at this stage, if both
printers worked before then it's a bit odd that the two have stopped
together, but not unknown (typically file permissions or broken
filters). If your printers are hooked up via ethernet and your
network/router has re-assigned their addresses (DHCP) then that can
cause this kind of breakage. As can forgetting that you (or someone
else) unplugged/re-routed the USB/Ethernet cables when tidying the desk
before Christmas.
Daniel
In cups, "Resume Printer"  Unable to do maintenance command: Forbidden
Cups -Show active jobs--none listed.
So was the status of the Printer "paused" to begin with? That error
message seems to suggest you haven't logged into CUPS (via the broswer)
with sufficient/root privileges to allow a resume. 

If not paused, what happens if you try to Pause the printer from the
Maintenance dropdown?

Do the Driver and Connection details under the Printer tab look
sensible? eg, in the browser (localhost:631) I click Printers from
heading, then click on the Queue Name Photosmart_5520 to see the
following (below the Maintenance & Administration dropdown buttons):

Description:	HP Photosmart 5520
Location:	corner of lounge
Driver:	HP Photosmart 5520 Series hpijs, 3.13.10 (color, 2-sided printing)
Connection:	hp:/net/Photosmart_5520_series?ip=192.168.1.65
Defaults:	job-sheets=none, none media=iso_a4_210x297mm sides=one-sided
...
The jobs that wouldn't print are shown as cancelled. One of them says
"Filter failed"  but the others don't. (Just looking at one printer at that
point.)
Seems to be the same for all four listings. ( Each printer is, and has been,
listed twice with slightly different settings--both used to work, at either
setting.)
I got the printers to work from a different computer, so it's OK on
that end, apparently. That tells me that the router has not reassigned
DHCP. (Both printers have fixed addresses.)
I'm kind of snowed at this point.   --doug
Don't despair, now you can dig in. 

Do you have enough disk space where the filter and print queue will be
spooling data:

$ df -h

Check your journal for cups related messages:

$ journalctl -u cups 

There's also the classic error_log, access_log & page_log files under
/var/log/cups:

$ less /var/log/cups/error_log

(or viewable from the browser under Administration->Server section)

Using those logs can you narrow down when the printing stopped working?
Has a system change or update caused the breakage? Using rpm to see
which packages have been installed or updated might be helpful:

$ rpm -qa --last |less

Hopefully you can work out what's gone wrong and then know what to fix.

 Daniel

Re: printing problems

Daniel Morris

Doug McGarrett

Knurpht-openSUSE

DennisG

Doug McGarrett

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