- Joined
- Dec 18, 2019
- Messages
- 6,586
There I was, fat dumb and happy, doing home system updates as a good little administrator should. Something to do with cups, a printer control software. At 5pm on Monday, all networking printing stopped. Of course there were quite a few updates that evening, on both my Raspberry Pi print server, and on my client computer. No one in the house could print, which made everyone grumpy. And me start tearing my hair out, trying to figure out how to fix it. Now, I'm not an IT guy, I have no formal or informal training, just the school of hard knocks.
I first searched on cups update issues, remote printing issues, and stuff like that and came up dry. The cups server was reporting a filter failure, so I looked in the logs. It looked like the client(s) weren't doing something as there was a whole lot of resending, but no errors were flagged in the error log. Screwed around with a bunch of things, and got one print from my phone, but after that, everything went quiet again. The two computers were waiting for something, but neither was telling me much.
Finally, this afternoon, I saw how to set up a Raspberry Pi to print on a network printer. A remote printer, not a local one. They recommended installing cups-client, which was installed already, and a file which I didn't have on my test RPI4. This file is called client.conf. In it is the name of the print server you wish to print to. On my RPI4 (headless) I tried printing a pdf file. Without client.conf, lp filename failed, because it didn't know where the printer was. After adding client.conf, I was able to print from a remote RPI4 to a remote RPI2 print server.
So I checked my laptop (running linux) and found it was missing client.conf as well. So I added the file. Lo and behold the lp command works. Lo and behold, printing from any app works. At least for the moment, a small victory, but at a big cost. I must of been working on this for 20 hours trying to fix this. There were no hits anywhere on search on this problem. Tons of tutorials on obsolete stuff, though.
Why did I care about printing? Well mostly because I use prints in the shop to make stuff. That's been on hold for the past three days. And also, we needed to download, print and sign a form.
It's kind of frustrating when something that has worked for well over 5 years, just stops and there's no breadcrumbs. No obvious clues whatsoever.
Somebody made a change somewhere, and didn't think it through. I'm surprised to see this on a linux system, since the error is assuming your computer is a server, rather than a client. That's PC centric thinking, not Linux/Unix network centric thinking. My laptop is a client to a print server. Anyways, I think it is fixed - at least until the next change shows up. Maybe tomorrow I can actually get some stuff done...
I first searched on cups update issues, remote printing issues, and stuff like that and came up dry. The cups server was reporting a filter failure, so I looked in the logs. It looked like the client(s) weren't doing something as there was a whole lot of resending, but no errors were flagged in the error log. Screwed around with a bunch of things, and got one print from my phone, but after that, everything went quiet again. The two computers were waiting for something, but neither was telling me much.
Finally, this afternoon, I saw how to set up a Raspberry Pi to print on a network printer. A remote printer, not a local one. They recommended installing cups-client, which was installed already, and a file which I didn't have on my test RPI4. This file is called client.conf. In it is the name of the print server you wish to print to. On my RPI4 (headless) I tried printing a pdf file. Without client.conf, lp filename failed, because it didn't know where the printer was. After adding client.conf, I was able to print from a remote RPI4 to a remote RPI2 print server.
So I checked my laptop (running linux) and found it was missing client.conf as well. So I added the file. Lo and behold the lp command works. Lo and behold, printing from any app works. At least for the moment, a small victory, but at a big cost. I must of been working on this for 20 hours trying to fix this. There were no hits anywhere on search on this problem. Tons of tutorials on obsolete stuff, though.
Why did I care about printing? Well mostly because I use prints in the shop to make stuff. That's been on hold for the past three days. And also, we needed to download, print and sign a form.
It's kind of frustrating when something that has worked for well over 5 years, just stops and there's no breadcrumbs. No obvious clues whatsoever.
Somebody made a change somewhere, and didn't think it through. I'm surprised to see this on a linux system, since the error is assuming your computer is a server, rather than a client. That's PC centric thinking, not Linux/Unix network centric thinking. My laptop is a client to a print server. Anyways, I think it is fixed - at least until the next change shows up. Maybe tomorrow I can actually get some stuff done...
