At Tue, 9 Feb 2010 22:37:28 -0600 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
In our computer lab, there are 6 Centos 5.4 workstations. There is an HP printer with jet direct card. It often works.
But sometimes users come and get me saying the printer is broken, but it is actually working fine for *most* of the workstations.
On the troubled system, I run system-config-printer and I check the printer in question (under properties) and I see the printer has been disabled. I mean, the box by the word Enabled is empty.
After I manually (use lprm) remove the print jobs, and set the printer to Enabled, then the print queue will start working again.
I've checked the files in /var/log/cups and there's nothing evident. error_log has nothing.
We have had the problem during the year (that others have reported in this list). When trying to print some pdf files from Evince, the symptom of the problem is that the pdf files don't print. They seem to "clog" the printer. When that happens, I have seen the Enabled box come unchecked in the printer configurator. However, the most recent problems are not associated with the use of Evince.
Unless you have a proper print filter for them (on the Linux system!), PDF files cannot be printed.
I would really appreciate some tips about how to bugshoot this problem.
pj
ps. The Cups server is running on the system in question, lpq shows lots of print jobs waiting.
Wondering if the printer *by itself* can manage handling connections for a number of workstations and arbitrating jobs. Maybe you need a Linux print server to manage the print queue and feed jobs to the printer one at a time. It seems like some of the workstations are getting a refused connection and thinking the printer is 'dead' (and thus disabling it), when it is merely too busy to respond. A proper linux print server would queue up the job and be ready for additional connections.