Print server showing printers offline?

[jmgibson1981]

The other day my wife was up at 5 am trying to print something. The dialog in her laptop (debian) said printers were offline. The printers are all under a single cups server (debian again). It took a few tries before it finally printed, she was almost late to where she was going. I got up a bit later, on my laptop at the time and out of nowhere the printer in the living room started pumping out pages. Found out later that is what she was trying to print earlier in the day. Also after she got home we checked the laser in the guest room, sure enough it also had printed 3+ copies of what she was trying to print. However it did this much later, well beyond when she actually tried to print the pages.

This was a few days ago, didn't have time to investigate till now. Any suggestions for keeping printers from going offline?

[Bulkley]

That stuff drives us nuts and it's not just Linux. We have a Windows computer in the house that constantly gets that printer is offline message. I get it occasionally on my Debian machine. Often the fix is to turn the printer off and back on again. I have come to the conclusion that printers are inhabited by ornery gremlins.

There is a possibility that Wifi has something to do with it. Do gremlins mess with Wifi too?

[jmgibson1981]

Gremlins would answer most issues

One printer is wired, the other is wifi. Problem on both so no dice on the wifi I don't think. Can I maybe send a ping to each printer every hour or so to keep them from going offline, just to show network traffic which would theoretically keep them up?

[Bulkley]

Your ping idea might work. The timing might have to be more frequently.

It's just possible that our printers have some sort of sleep mode. If so, mine usually wakes up when we want to print but not always. I wonder if it can be adjusted.

[jmgibson1981]

Set to every 5 minutes. See what happens over the next few weeks. We don't print often but when we do we expect it to work right away.