TurbpPrint Printer Monitor is broken

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darkstar
Posts: 13
Joined: Tue Jan 09, 2007 5:53 am

TurbpPrint Printer Monitor is broken

Post by darkstar »

I have set up TurboPrint on a SuSE Linux system to support a Canon printer that is connected to a Windows2000 machine on my network. I am having a LOT of difficulties getting this to work reliably but will focus for now on a problem that has recently come up and is a show stopper at the moment...

The TurboPrint Printer Monitor has started reporting that the Canon printer is not connected or switched off. That is NOT true and I suspect the programmers of TurboPrint have created a bad error handling design and are simply reporting this error message as a guess of what might be wrong. (The printer works fine from the Windows machine it is connected to, and from other Windows machines on our network that send jobs directly to it) Therefore I think it is safe to assume the printer, Windows printer server and network are all ok. And I can reach the Windows print server via pings and VNC from my Linux server, so the network between my Linux server and the Windows machine is ok also. I tried turning off the firewall as well to make sure it was not interfering with Turboprint.

The TurboPrint Printer Monitor also is reporting that the printer is Stopped. When I click on the button to attempt to start the printer, I get a popup box asking me for the Cups password and it asks me to fill in a username and password. Since there is no user called Cups on my system, I initially guessed it is asking for root as the username and roots password. But when I typed those in, it fails to accept them. So I started guessing other possibilities such as my own username and password.. the password for the username of lp which is the username the cups daemon runs under all to no joy... I give up, I haven't got a clue as to what possible user name and password is being requested for and have no idea what a Cups password could possibly be!

What is even more baffling is that if I bring up the CUPs admin web page all IT wants is the password for root. This indicates to me that CUPs itself does not have any requirement for a special password, so why should TurboPrint think there is one and/or not accept root and root's password?

Looking in the log files is not much help either.

In config.log there were these two error messages -
ERROR:
cups::get_or_set_printer_status: CUPS_START_PRINTER=1 failed
ERROR:
cups::set_default_printer: no response of CUPS_SET_DEFAULT request

In print.log I see error messages like these -
ERROR:
inifile::write: could not open output file
/var/turboprint/marc/tp0.ink
Time for <Profile> = 530
...
child process terminated
ERROR:
inifile::write: could not open output file
/var/turboprint/marc/tp0.job

I checked the permissions of these files and they are read writable by the owner, group and world... so I dunno what could be wrong here either...


Regardless of whatever is causing this problem, there is a design flaw in the TurboPrint Printer Monitor app which needs to be fixed. The user (me in this case) is given no clue as to what is really wrong and how to fix it.



:? Darkstar
zedonet
Site Admin
Posts: 2156
Joined: Fri Oct 06, 2006 8:02 am

Post by zedonet »

Hello,

thank you for your feedback!

There seem to two different problems:

1. TurboPrint Monitor reports an error condition that doesn't exist

Error reporting for network printers depends on the network protocol. Please open "TurboPrint Control" and check which "URI" is listed in the table of printers and post the "URI" entry.

2. It is not possible to start/stop the printer from TurboPrint Monitor

Usually, the user is "root" and the password is the root password - this works e.g. for our SuSE11.1 installation.

CUPS can keep its own set of passwords that can be set and modified with the "lppasswd" command (if the CUPS daemon isn't running as "root", it cannot access the system passwords). However, if you can authorize to the CUPS web frontend with your root password, it should also work in TurboPrint Monitor.

Another possibility control a print queue (start printer / stop printer / accept jobs / reject jobs) is from a root commandline
using the commands "cupsenable" / "cupsdisable" / "accept" / "reject", e.g.

cupsenable tp0

starts print queue "tp0".
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