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Re: 100's of blank pages



On Thu, Feb 10, 2005 at 08:01:42PM +0000, Joe Mc Cool wrote:
> Woody and Cups.
> 
> Sometimes garbage data is accidently send to my LJ4 printer.  This 
> causes it to go beserk and print loads and loads of blank pages, often 
> interspersed with spurious gibberish.
> 
> Power cycling the printer has no effect.  It continues to print blank 
> pages.    Power cycling the pc has no effect either.
> 
> If I remove the cable from the back of the printer, the printing stops, 
> so the data has to be coming from my Debian box.   Yet, I check the LJ4 
> queue in Cups and it is empty.  I check /var/spool/lpd/lj4 and it too is 
> empty.
> 
> Where is this data coming from and how can I stop it ?  Please.

Run ps ax and you'll see a bunch of processes leading to one named
"parallel" something (assuming your printer's on the parallel port).
Kill the "parallel" process, and the ones feeding it (probably
ghostscript ones) if they're still running. Don't be afraid to kill -9
them if they refuse to die.

I've had the exact same problem occasionally, with the same lack of
response even to savage methods like power-cycling the computer. IMO
it should be possible to stop any print job at any stage in its
printing dead in its tracks with either "lprm" on the command line or
"cancel job" from the CUPS web interface. The fact that this is not
the case, and the associated waste of paper, is about the only thing
in Linux that has really pissed me off... which is a pretty good
endorsement of the system :-)

-- 
Pigeon

Be kind to pigeons
Get my GPG key here: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x21C61F7F

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