Printing troubleshooter

At times you'll notice that the printer header sheets (these are called “banner pages” in CUPS parlance) randomly change to a new format. Usually important information like who printed the job and other things disappear from the banner page.

The cause for this is most likely a software update on the CUPS server, cups.cs.wpi.edu. You can repair the banner sheets by logging into cups.cs.wpi.edu and going to the directory /usr/share/cups/banners. You'll find, most likely, that the file /usr/share/cups/banners/standard has been changed and is no longer the same as the file /usr/share/cups/banners/standard-WPICS-CURRENT.

Rename the existing file “standard” to some other filename:

mv standard standard-original-YYYYMMDD

and then copy the WPICS standard page so that it gets used instead:

cp standard-WPICS-CURRENT standard

This should cure the banner-sheet problem.

For printing to work, a few things need to be true.

• For UNIX printing to work, the CUPS server must be running on lpd.cs.wpi.edu. This can be checked by connecting your web-browser to https://lpd.cs.wpi.edu:631/ . If you get no response to your connection, the CUPS server is down and needs to be restarted.
• In the old days, you needed to be on the CS Domain, but this may not be the case anymore as we don't use samba-sharing of printers, we connect directly using LPD. This should change at some point if possible.
• And of course the basics: network, nameservice, etc etc are a bonus if you want to get anything accomplished.

[John probably is better at writing this troubleshooting section]

• Are the printers added? Check to see if they're there at all! If not, use quick add printer script from here.

Does samba adding of printers FUNCTION anymore? –mvoorhis 22 March 2012

See printer adding technique for non-domain machines.

This works for both XP and Vista machines, allegedly.

• are printers setup? Look at /etc/printcap, which will exist with either CUPS or LPD. If this file is empty or your printer isn't in this file, that explains your printing problem. See the page for adding printers to unix machines.
• is a printer daemon (LPD, CUPS) running? run “ps auxw” and look for root-owned process called “lpd” or “cupsd” in the output. If neither one is there, you are not running a printer daemon and this may be your problem. The daemon can be started usually by running “/etc/init.d/lpd start” or “/etc/init.d/cups start” or something similar. Sometimes instead of “/etc/init.d” the directory containing start-scripts is “/etc/rc.d”.

If Nagios is telling you that the CUPS server is unresponsive, the CUPS web-interface won't work. You'll need to SSH into the print server and restart the cups daemon by hand. Restart everything:

If it looks like lpd and samba are running but things are still hokey, try restarting everything.

on lpd.cs.wpi.edu:

  sudo service cups stop
  sudo service cups start

  sudo service smbd stop
  sudo service nmbd stop
  sudo service nmbd start
  sudo service smbd start