[cups.general] The Famous "Media tray empty!" error - revisited

[Steven P. Ulrick]

On Thu, 8 Jul 2004 16:21:07 +0000 (UTC)
Enrique Perez-Terron <enrio at online.no> wrote:

> "Steven P. Ulrick" wrote:
> > Hello, Again :)
> > This is getting kind of old :(  I went to print something, and my
> > printing configuration was gone!  After a few feeble attempts at
> > fixing it, I rebooted, tried few other things, no luck.  Force
> > installed all three CUPS rpm's.  This time it didn't work :(  Now I
> > get this error when I attempt to print a test page:
> > There was a problem sending CUPS test page
> > to 'SamsungML1250LaserPrinter' queue:
> >
> > lpr: unable to print file: client-error-not-found
> 
> May I suggest that you make some special efforts to investigate this:
> 
> create a snapshot of /etc/cups, /usr/lib/cups, /usr/share/cups,
> /var/log/cups, and /var/spool/cups.
> 
> You could for instance write a cron job that creates a tarball from
> these directories every night and keeps the last five such tarballs at
> all times.
> 
> Create one such tarball now, and again when you get the system working
> again. This is kind of a big hammer, but it should enable us to
> pinpoint what exactly has changed when the system works and when it
> does not.
> 
> To create a tarball:
> 
> su - root -c 'cd /; tar zcf /var/tmp/cups-snapshot-$(date \
> +%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M:%S).tar.gz {etc,usr/{lib,share},var/{log,spool}}/cups'


Hello, Enrique :)
When I attempt to run the above command, I get the following error:
/var/tmp/cups-snapshot-2004-07-12_14: Unknown host
tar (child): /var/tmp/cups-snapshot-2004-07-12_14\:19\:53.tar.gz: Cannot
open: Input/output error
tar (child): Error is not recoverable: exiting now

I want to help you on this, but I cannot proceed past this point.  Any
help you can give me is greatly appreciated :)
Just checked, and a tarball was created - the size was 15.3mb
Midnight Commander said it was corrupted.  When I attempt to "gunzip"
it, I get the following error:
gunzip: cups-snapshot-.tar.gz: unexpected end of file
Attempting to browse it in konqueror appears to work fine.
The name of this tarball is:
cups-snapshot-.tar.gz


> Also set the LogLevel in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf to debug:
>     (Not tested! Better do this manually:)
>   ed /etc/cups/cupsd.conf <<EOF
>   /^LogLevel /c
>   LogLevel debug
>   .
>   wq
>   EOF


I didn't use exactly the method that you stated above, but the
appropriate line in "/etc/cups/cupsd.conf" now reads thusly:
LogLevel debug

Will this be sufficient?


> 
> As it is, you could inspect the file(s) /var/log/cups/error_log*
> to see if you find any hints.


I will get on that when I have some time tomorrow :)


Update: Last night, my wife called me at work because she wanted to
print some documents for her Master's degree class.  To make a long
story short, the printer had dissapeared again!  When I got home, I
started working on it again.  I configured it using
"system-config-printer", and all SEEMED to go well.  Still, the printer
wasn't there.  So, I opened a web browser, and went to
"http://localhost:631/", clicked on "Manage Printers", and I was told
that I had no printer's installed.  So, just guessing, I went to
"system-config-services" and checked the CUPS daemon.  I was told that
it was running.  Again, just guessing, I chose to "Start" the CUPS
daemon.  The result: I had our printer back!  Tomorrow morning, after I
get off work, I will experiment along those lines again, to see if I can
duplicate the problem.  Right now, the printer is working fine.

Thanks again for your continued interest, and if you can help me on the
issues I described at the beginning of this email, I will gladly set up
a cron job and keep as many tarballs of the results as you want (We have
320 gigabytes of harddrive space, so I could go to "debug2" if you
wanted :))

Have a Great Day :)
Steven P. Ulrick