The printer is not responding

Latest response

Running either rhel 5.5 with older settings or rhel 7.2 with latest CUPS updates I am seeing more and more cases where print jobs will hang with a state of "The printer is not responding". I have the printer set for retry-jobs and the jobs will always print if I cycle power on the printer or move the job to a different printer. I am able to ping the printer and this is happening in both a local environment and a wide area network. Never experienced this in the past with a physical box. Been running virtual for several years and this has just started to be more of an issue in the last 2 months primarily with Datamax barcode printers setup as socket://hostname:9100 and generic with the text-only driver or with the generic PCL 5e driver.

Responses

Some older JetDirect print servers (and their clones) can only handle one connection at a time. If system B tries to connect to the printer while system A is currently printing on it, B might time out before A's print job is complete. In CUPS, it results in "printer is not responding", exactly like what you're seeing.

I think HP provided a fix for that in their JetDirect firmware upgrades, but I don't know about other brands' JetDirect clones.

The workaround would be to designate a single print server that will be the only one to access the printer itself, and have all the other systems route their printing through that server.

Another possibility is vulnerability scans: I know that some older printers' network interfaces can hang if the network segment they're in is scanned with Nessus or similar product. Again, the fix is delivered as firmware updates to the printer.

Thanks Matti - you make a good point about multiple connections but in my case these printers that are getting "stuck" are only printing from the CUPS system alone on one server. I would not think it is the driver but one other option I have thought of is somehow to create my own ppd file from the windows driver as Datmax does not have any unix drivers.

I also see similar issue with one of my customer also reported same issue. His cups version is cups-lpd-1.6.3-22.el7.x86_64, and seeing the following messages in error_log.

W [26/Apr/2017:22:34:13 +0200] Unexpected 'document-format' operation attribute in a Create-Job request. W [26/Apr/2017:22:34:13 +0200] Unexpected 'document-name' operation attribute in a Create-Job request. E [26/Apr/2017:22:34:15 +0200] [Job 36438] The printer is not responding. E [26/Apr/2017:22:34:18 +0200] [Job 48682] The printer is not responding. E [26/Apr/2017:22:34:19 +0200] [Job 21757] The printer is not responding. E [26/Apr/2017:22:34:30 +0200] [Job 51540] The printer is not responding. E [26/Apr/2017:22:34:32 +0200] [Job 39407] The printer is not responding. W [26/Apr/2017:22:34:13 +0200] Unexpected 'document-format' operation attribute in a Create-Job request. W [26/Apr/2017:22:34:13 +0200] Unexpected 'document-name' operation attribute in a Create-Job request.

What I understand from the above discussion you think this is happening because of Printer has old Firmware....

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