Printing oddity with Canon Pixma MP240 on CUPS server

[Karl Auer]

I have a Canon Pixma MP240, quite an old item, but it prints, scans and
copies fine.

Recently I set it up with on a Raspberry Pi as a networked scanner.
Worked well! Then an unfortunate incident involving a laser printer and
a power surge made it necessary to get a stopgap printer, so I added
CUPS and made the old inkjet into a networked printer. There is a CUPS
driver just for that model, so that was good. It worked well from Linux
at least as far as a test page went, so I added Samba to the Pi and
made it available to the Windows PCs as well.

We now find that it only seems able to print six pages. From Linux OR
from Windows, so it's not Samba. Then the printer stops printing, and
its little activity lights twirl endlessly (hours, or until we power-
cycle the printer). The sample size is quite small - only about five
print jobs - but it does seem to stop after (correctly and completely)
printing six pages.

CUPS thinks it's all printed, and indicates the printer is "idle,
accepting jobs", but additional jobs just wait forever. Pausing and
resuming the printer has no effect. Sometimes CUPS thinks it is still
sending data to the printer, but that state is indefinite as well. It
may time out eventually, but if it does it is after several hours.

There are no page limits that I can see in the printer options. The
CUPS logs have nothing of interest.

I've tried two USB cables just in case it's some weird handshake
problem, but it seem doesn't relate to quantity of data sent.

I've googled extensively but can't find matching symptoms. Most printer
issues are much more dramatic - no print at all, garbled printing,
distorted printing, error messages, endless blank sheets and so on. My
prints are perfect - they just stop happening after six pages.

Anyone have any ideas? 

Regards, K.

-- 
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Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer
http://twitter.com/kauer389

GPG fingerprint: A52E F6B9 708B 51C4 85E6 1634 0571 ADF9 3C1C 6A3A
Old fingerprint: E00D 64ED 9C6A 8605 21E0 0ED0 EE64 2BEE CBCB C38B