[CentOS] what causes CUPS to dis-enable a printer?

Paul Johnson

pauljohn32 at gmail.com
Wed Feb 10 04:37:28 UTC 2010


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.

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.


-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas



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