Bug#879491: cups: printing 3 copies of every page
Hello Julian; thank you for your report.
On Sun 22 Oct 2017 at 09:20:28 +0100, Julian Gilbey wrote:
> Package: cups
> Version: 2.2.5-2
> Severity: important
>
> (I'm labelling this as "important" because it's wasting large amounts
> of paper.)
>
> This is a weird bug, and I have little idea how to track down the
> cause.
>
> About a week or so ago, on my Debian testing system, printing commands
> started producing three copies of every page on my local printer (so a
> 2-page document would come out at 3 copies of page 1 followed by 3
> copies of page 2). This is the case in at least all of the following
> circumstances:
Can this changed be pinned down to any particular version of cups or
cups-filters? Or something you altered in cupsd.conf (for example) at
that time?
> * Connect the printer with a USB cable, print via usb://...
> * Connect the printer with via ethernet, print via dnssd://...
> * Print from evince
> * Print using lpr (eg: echo hello | lpr)
> * Going to http://localhost:603/ and doing Maintenance -> Print Test Page
>
> However, going to http://localhost:603/ and doing Maintenance -> Print
> SELF Test Page only produces a single page of output!
A self-test page is actually produced by the printer itself; it is often
done from a button on the printer. The filtering system is not involved.
Did you really use port 603 to bring up the CUPS web interface?
You also mention Windows and Mac machines. I am not familiar with
printing from either of these, but my understanding is that Windows does
all the processing and sends the completed job to a CUPS server, which
does no processing. That is, the filtering system is bypassed. I wonder
whether your Mac is doing this too.
> I have updated cups to the latest version today (2.2.5-2), and that
> has made no difference, and nor has deleting the printer from CUPS and
> reinstalling it. The PPD files have not changed in about a year
> (except for the uninstalling and reinstalling, and even that installed
> an identical copy to the existing PPD file).
>
> So I'm at a bit of a loss as to the cause of this. I also don't see
> anything obvious in the log files, but I may be missing something.
>
> Any suggestions?
We'll need the printer model, the PPD used and an error_log. Let's
standardise on doing
lp -d <print_queue> /etc/nsswitch
with a USB connection to the printer.
https://wiki.debian.org/DissectingandDebuggingtheCUPSPrintingSystem#The_CUPS_Error_Log
gives you a way of getting the error_log. It compresses very nicely with
gzip to make it acceptable to be sent to debian-printing as well as the
bug.
Would you also look in /var/spool/cups before and after printing and
report on any change in the "d" files there, please.
Regards,
Brian.
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