shared HP printer entering paused state, and printing error messages

[Ryan Jacobs]

Hello,

I am not sure if this is a samba or cups specific question, but this is 
a problem I have only experienced on Ubuntu, so maybe someone has some 
insight....

On our Hoary server, we have a USB HP LaserJet 1010 shared via samba to 
a small office LAN (Linux, win, and mac clients). This was setup simply 
by adding the printer through the Gnome interface, and then enabling 
sharing via samba (smb.conf part pasted at end). On the client side, we 
simply add it as a shared windows printer and use local HP-specific 
drivers (different for each platform of course).

The problem is that we sometimes start receiving printouts that say 
simply "Unsupported Personality: PCL", instead of the actual job. When 
this happens, the printer power must be recycled to get proper jobs to 
go through again. I did a bunch of research and all I could find was 
that this is a "known bug" in samba with some HP printers....

Ok, well the above is only a bit of an annoyance. What's really a 
problem is that sometimes, seemingly correlated to the problem above 
(but still rather random), the printer will enter a "paused" state. The 
only way (that I have found) to un-pause it is to go into Gnome 
interface, access printers, become and administrator, and un-pause.

If an admin is not around to do this, people start rebooting things... 
which, of course, does not un-pause anything.

So I'm wondering if anyone has any insight into these problems, or 
perhaps some insight into how to best access the print queue and change 
printer state as a regular LAN user... I was never able to get a CUPs 
webadmin interface happening properly with Ubuntu (I'm happy to talk 
more about what I've tried, but I'll save that for later).

Any help, or push in the right direction is greatly appreciated...

Cheers,
Ryan



------ relevant part of smb.conf -----

## standard printer definition to automatically include all installed
## cups printers as shares
[printers]
comment = All Printers
path = /var/spool/samba
public = yes
printable = yes
browseable = yes

-------------