Spoiled Brat Printers

I really enjoyed this "Your printer is a spoiled brat" cartoon. It's funny, but oh so true: printing is a source of a lot of problems and frustrations.

There are over 240 posts here about printing. When I think back over more than a quarter century of computer support, a lot of what I remember is printer problems. My wife's most common computer complaint from her XP machine? Her printer isn't working or is printing too small, too big..

From the Unix side of things, the only time I have printer problems here in my office is when the printer forgets its IP address. Other than that, no issues. At the same time that my wife's XP is saying the printer isn't ready, I can happily print.

You can test printers by bypassing all spooling and going direct to the printer itself. That's true even for network printers: I use this simple Perl script for HP and other "port" printers:

 #!/usr/bin/perl
 use IO::Socket;
 $host=shift @ARGV;
 $port=shift @ARGV;
 $socket=IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr=>$host, PeerPort=>$port, Proto=>'tcp',
 Type=> SOCK_STREAM) or die "Can't talk to $host at $port";
 
 while (<>) {
 print $socket $_;
 }
 close $socket; 
 

You'd use that like this:

 perlnetcat.pl   192.168.1.14   9100   testfile
 

If that puts "testfile" on the printer, your spooler is confused.

My current printer problem

I've got a very strange printer problem at a customer's warehouse. Here's the setup: a few times per day they print out ten 4-5 page reports. The first time they do it, the reports stop about half way through.

We all know that when something stops like that, it's flow control. In this case this is on an HP print server, so you'd say the buffer fills up and the flow control fails so the rest of the jobs get lost. Sure, but that doesn't explain why they can follow up with the same set of jobs and they WILL print. The printer will continue to be fine all day long unless.. unless it goes more than an hour without printing anything.

So just send something short before the first long job in the morning? Nope, that doesn't help.

That's just weird. Obviously it's something to do with the print server, but those symptoms are beyond strange.. right now, I'm baffled.

Your printer is a spoiled brat, indeed.