Saturday, June 19, 2004

OS X Printing Problem: Printing to an HP DeskJet 882C on a Hawking Print Server

Mac OS X Panther (10.3.2)
William Brinkley
I followed Guillaume Gete Feb.23 tip: 'It seems the issue is in the CUPS printing server, which creates an incredible amount of temp files in /var/spool/cups/tmp/. Rebooting sometimes helps, but sometimes does not. Therefore, you must log in as an admin, and type in the Terminal : sudo rm -rf /var/spool/cups/tmp/' Unfortunately, my printer (HP Laserjet 4mv) then had'Jobs Stopped' and when I click the 'Start Jobs' icon, the job tries to print, but nothing happened.

After considerable research, and an excellent suggestion from a friend that I simply add another /tmp/ folder, here's the fix for the 'tip' but note: I am NOT a Unix user. The above was my first, and now, most likely, last Unix command on the Mac.

Open NetInfo Manager (Applications/Utilities)

Unlock it (give admin name & pw)

Choose: 'Security-Enable Root User

OK out, using passwords as requested

Quit NetInfo Manager

Log out; log in again as 'root'

Navigate to to /var/spool/ folder

Open the /cups/ folder

Create a new folder: /tmp/

Log out as 'root' and log back in normally.

After the above, my printer allowed me to print the job which had been queued at some point, waiting for the 'tmp' folder (I guess). Hope this helps anyone inexperienced and/or foolish enough to try the above-mentioned tip, as I did.

My iBook has never printed properly to my Win2K hosted HP 882C. Instead I saved jobs to PDF and printed them from the PC.

This irritated me, but I was also unhappy with the way Win2K supported printer sharing for any machine. (One of XP's big improvements on Win2K printing. Any printer hiccup will mangle the Win2K printing services, requiring a command line or Admin tool service stop/restart.) So I moved the old DeskJet to my Hakwing 12PSU print server.

Worked very well for my PCs using the Hawkings tool or IPP printing. Better than the Win2K share!

Then I worked on my OS X machine. I found using http://10.0.1.250/lp3 with internet printing http (Advances setup using Print Center or use localhost:631 and use Samba web client setup) worked well. But I couldn't get CUPS printing to work well. I tried lots of things, including an OS X shareware tool that is supposed to fix bad printing situations. I had best success using the CUPS web client to install a printer accessing the HP CUPS/Linux driver set.

Turns out though that HP now has a native OS X driver (32MB download). So I'll try that ...

UPDATE: The HP driver seemed to work, then stopped working. No error messages -- a print job would start then the printer would go offline. I switched to root and added the printer as root. Seems to work now for all users. I figure a security update changed print privileges and broke the late 2003 driver, HP hasn't updated it. We'll see ...

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