[cups] Print jobs pausing queue

[Michael Weghorn]

Brian,

I do not have any experience with a setup including separate clients and
print servers, so the following assumptions/ideas might be wrong.

In the debug log, I cannot see anything that seems related to the
problem. All of the messages have either debug (line starts with "D") or
info ("I") level, there are no warnings or errors in the log file.
In fact, I cannot even identify any print job in the log file. To me,
the messages rather look like they were documenting access to the CUPS
web interface, which I assume particularly because of the following lines:

> D [22/Jan/2016:09:30:00 -0800] [CGI] argv[0] = "/usr/libexec/cups/cgi-bin/admin.cgi"
> [...]
> D [22/Jan/2016:09:30:00 -0800] [CGI] envp[30] = "HTTP_USER_AGENT=Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_2) AppleWebKit/601.3.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.0.2 Safari/601.3.9"

This indicates a CGI script being run and that the connected client is a
web browser.


Do you possibly have another error_log (or part of one) that contains
more information? In particular, something containing "argv[5]" or so
might be interesting - or lines starting with either "E" (error) or at
least "W" (warning).

Is there also an error_log on the clients where the printing stops
working? Have you looked at it? Does it contain helpful information?


> [...] and then they sometimes can delete and re-add the printer on
> their client computer and it will work again.

That sounds to me like the queue was only paused on the client, not on
the server.
Is printing from other clients still possible when it stops working for
one client? Could you check whether the queue is paused on the server or
on the client? The command "lpstat -p <queue_name>" should show the
status of the print queue (and I think you should be able to run it
both, on the client and the server).


Did you try setting the "ErrorPolicy" for the printer queue to something
different than "stop-printer" (e.g. "abort-job") (on the client and/or
the server)? In my opinion, this should at least prevent the printer
from being stopped and other print jobs should still work.


Best regards,

Michael

On 2016-01-22 18:44, Brian Corbin wrote:
> We have debugging turned on for our CUPS server, but the print queue
> keeps pausing on this one printer and we can’t figure it out.  Our
> clients are starting to get upset over it.  And now this same problem
> seems to be happening with another printer queue as well.  The weird
> thing is if they delete and re-add the computer on their client
> machine, it sometimes fixes the problem and then they can print
> again.  But it seems every hour it will stop printing and the queue
> will pause on it’s own and then they sometimes can delete and re-add
> the printer on their client computer and it will work again.  Yet the
> print job is making it to the queue on the server and the server is
> doing the pausing. So it makes no sense to me what is happening.  We
> have two identical printers on our campus.  One printer is on one
> CUPS server, and we have the other printer on another CUPS server.
> One works great with no problems to our clients and the other is
> constantly pausing he queue whenever certain print jobs are sent to
> it and we can’t figure out what is the cause.  The error log doesn’t
> make sense to what it’s having the problem with and we know the
> printer does work fine if you print directly to it without the print
> server.  I have a section of the log file below to see if maybe you
> can help us identify the problem because it seems to be getting worse
> and ticking off our clients.  The Printer is a Konica Minolta BizHub
> C5501 with a Fiery Unit attached to it for processing.  Any help you
> can provide would be most appreciative.
> 
> Brian