Debugging printer problem

vserghi · April 10, 2015, 9:55am

Hi, I have a Brother HL-3150CDW printer installed, and for the most part, works well.

Occaisionally, it will decide to print out a mass of identical pages when only one was requested. How can I go about finding out where the problem lies?

ie, is it the app, CUPS, the printer. At some pioint the number of pages gets changed.

It is very frustrating to deal with irate staff who see this happening, not to mention the waste of paper and ink.

OpenSuse 13.2 and KDE

ced117 · April 12, 2015, 10:23pm

Really strange.
Have you tried to remove and re-add the printer ?

vserghi · April 13, 2015, 10:35am

Nope. I’m not sure if that will achieve anything to be honest. If it works 95% of the time and goes beserk that odd occaision, I don’t think it would be the current installation.

I’ll do it anyway, becuase, I can and it is easy to do. I have been looking at the CUPS documentation. I think there are some commands/log files I can look to see what is going on.

ced117 · April 14, 2015, 6:33pm

Right

Did you manually install the driver or was it automatic ?

vserghi · May 2, 2015, 1:36pm

Well, I wanted to print off a 20 page document. It decided to print 10 pages of page 1, eleven pages of page 2 before I stopped it. I had another one page document, it decided to print off 8 pages, duplex style.

Seriously pissed off!!

Deleting the printer driver and starting over.

deano_ferrari · May 2, 2015, 11:47pm

I’ve not heard of this problem before. It leads me to ask more questions.

Does it occur when printing from a particular application, document type, or is it independent of these?
Is there another printer you can try printing with (to check behaviour)? Perhaps printing to file would be a good enough test. It might prove that it is the Brother printer driver for example.