Failed print jobs reported completed

[T J Tulley]

[Using LinuxMint8 with Windows-7 on a laptop with Pentium dual-core 2.2 GHz cpu, 4 GB RAM, 500GB hdd]

This is the latest in a series of problems with my Epson Photo Stylus 915 which has worked excellently in this sytem until recently.

After clearing Pending jobs by the command $ cancel -a the printer printed 1 small job - the next was a small txt file which turned itself into a long series of printed statements, perhaps a pdf file - individual characters and groups from the txt file could be discerned. [This was NOT set to Print to pdf, which would have created a file in my home page].

Since then no jobs have been printed. When I view the Document Print Status and select "Show completed jobs" all the jobs that have failed to print are listed as Completed. The printer successfully performs a jet test when the appropriate button sequence is operated, so is evidently in good mechanical order. This therefore appears to be a software fault in the system.

I haven't installed the printer driver in Windows on this machine - there would probably be compatibility problems, and I'm not using Windows at all at present so I'm reluctant to embark on that procedure.

Grateful for any help, as usual:


Yours hopefully, -



Theo Tulley.

[DrHu]

You could completely clean up the print subsystem: CUPS
--remove completely, then reinstall CUPS and see if it is cleaned up, this is the simplest method of making sure that you get a clean slate., you then have to reset your printer by adding it again..

Or just in case it is the cups-pdf driver that is messing up the queues, you might start by removing that item and seeing if the queues behavior is corrected ?

There are some cups-pdf issues existing for remote printing..
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/391886
--I don't remember if it was remote or local printing you were doing..

Other areas worth looking at..
AppArmour
http://www.linuxjournal.com/magazine/pa ... r-ubuntu-9
--I don't see that AppArmour is being used by CUPS, although it should be: as a matter of fact I don't even think AppArmour (apparmour) is being installed in Mint 7..(UBuntu?, don't know, don't use it..)
In terminal, checked..

• apt search apparmor
  p apparmor - User-space parser utility for AppArmor
  p apparmor-docs - Documentation for AppArmor
  p apparmor-profiles - Profiles for AppArmor Security policies
  p apparmor-utils - Utilities for controlling AppArmor
  p libapache2-mod-apparmor - changehat AppArmor library as an Apache mo
  p libapparmor-dev - AppArmor development libraries and header
  i libapparmor-perl - AppArmor library Perl bindings
  i libapparmor1 - changehat AppArmor library
  p libpam-apparmor - changehat AppArmor library as a PAM module

Maybe its in stealth mode like ubuntu..
In terminal, check

• locate apparmor
  /etc/apparmor.d
  /etc/apparmor.d/force-complain
  /etc/apparmor.d/sbin.dhclient3
  /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.cupsd

Also you should have a look at your CUPS logs in /var/logs/cups*
--error_log or access_log..

[T J Tulley]

Thanks DrHu.

Search apparmor gave the same result as yours;
Locate apparmor gave a much longer list but it did include /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.cupsd which you emboldened.

I looked at the error and access logs - last weeks troubles appear to be due to an Invalid command 'Clean' which I did see reported then.
The access logs report a lot of successes which didn't happen yesterday.

Before I can remove and reload cups I need access to the repository. Firefox and Thunderbird are working well but the MintUpdate padlock appeared locked; when I clicked it i got a blank Update Manager chart with a box saying:
"Could not download all repository indexes
The repository may no longer be available or could not be contacted because of network problems. If available an older version of the failed index will be used. Otherwise the repository will be ignored. Check your network connection and ensure the repository address in the preferences is correct."

When I closed that box, another appeared saying: An error has occurred - the following details are provided:
"E: Could not get lock /var/lib/apt/lists/lock - open (11: Resource temporarily unavailable)
E: Unable to lock the list directory"
and sure enough, that file appears with a padlock on it, 0 bytes, modified 27/10/2009. type unknown. All the other files near there were modified very recently.
I've just looked at Preferences in the Edit menu of Update Manager and see that under Update Method, the address is shown as google.com. Is that correct? I've never been there before.

Now I've closed Update Manager and opened Synaptic from the Control Centre which seems to be working OK.
I have completely removed cups server and one dependent file, and then installed them again, and re-installed the other accessory cups files - bsd, client, common and pdf. After that I installed my printer again and it printed a test page as Job 1. But I see that MintUpdate still shows a broken padlock!


Yours hopefully, -



Theo Tulley.