Troubleshooting & technical FAQ's

See Running in a Workgroup environment.

There are two main causes of this problem:

• Users are not correctly logging on to your network domain or computer. If the domain server does NOT authorize users, PaperCut MF has no way of knowing who submitted the print job. With system policies, you can make login to the domain mandatory, eliminating this problem. Alternatively, you can set printer permissions on the print serverA print server is a system responsible for hosting print queues and sharing printer resources to desktops. Users submit print jobs to a print server rather then directly to the printer itself. A print server can be a dedicated server but on many networks this server also performs other tasks, such as, file serving to ensure only valid users can print to the printers.

• Alternatively, you can configure the client computer to print directly to the network interface printer. Ensure all network clients are configured as outlined in the PaperCut MF installation guide. All print jobs must pass through the print server running PaperCut MF.

PaperCut MF currently supports about 90% of printers on the market. If a printer's language is not recognized, PaperCut MF cannot detect any pages and record the print job as a zero page count. This is usually accompanied with an error message in the Application Event Log. We recommend you try the following problem resolution actions:

1. Many printers come with a variety of driver options. Install the Postscript drivers if one is available for the printer. Do this on both the print server and all network clients.

2. Try the drivers included with the Windows CD. PaperCut MF supports the majority of drivers distributed with recent Windows releases.

3. Try turning Enable advanced printing features as follows:

   1. On the print server, select Start > Settings > Printers.

   2. Right-click the printer; then select Properties

   3. Select the Advanced Tab.

   4. Turn off (disable) the Enable advanced printing features.

   For more information, see Knowledge Base.

4. If you're still having problems, email PaperCut Software support. We might be able to recommend a suitable set up or even supply a recent update supporting your hardware.

5. Specific information on printer compatibility is available in the PaperCut Knowledge Base. Information here might be of assistance.

Configure the Print ProviderA Print Provider is a monitoring service installed on a secondary print server to allow PaperCut to control and track printers. This monitoring component intercepts the local printing and reports the use back to the primary Application Server. via its configuration to ignore a printer. For more information see Adding and removing/deleting/ignoring printers.

PaperCut MF formats the currency based off the operating system's default regional settings. If the default regional settings are incorrect, you can change the format by defining your location under Options > General > Display Settings > Location .

There are a number of possible explanations. The first step is to open the Print Provider's log file on the secondary serverA PaperCut secondary server is a system that directly hosts a printer, that is, a print server with a Print Provider installed. A secondary server can be a server style system hosting many printers, a desktop style system hosting printer(s) also shared to other network users, or a desktop style system with the printer used only for local users (not shared).. This file often contains error messages indicating the cause or type of error. On a Windows system the log file is located at: [app-path]\providers\print\win\print-provider.log Open this file from any text editor such as Notepad.

Some common issues are:

1. Verify that the secondary server's name is correctly defined in the print-provider.conf file. Open a command prompt on the secondary server and use the ping command to verify that the server can be contacted under this name. A server restart (or a manual restart of the PaperCut Print Provider service) is required for any changes to the file to take effect.

2. Ensure that firewall software on the primary server is not preventing the secondary server from connecting on port 9191. Configure your firewalls to allow all local network traffic on this particular port.

   A quick way to see if the secondary server can connect to the primary server is to use the command-line telnet program. Simply type: telnet servername 9191 at a command prompt.

   • If you receive an error such as Could not open connection to host, then there is probably a network/firewall issue not letting the connection through.

   • If the screen goes blank then the connection was established successfully. Press Ctrl+] then type quit to close the telnet session.

3. Check that the Print Provider process/service is in fact installed and running. On a Windows system this is located under: Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Services

The client software needs to contact the Application ServerAn Application Server is the primary server program responsible for providing the PaperCut user interface, storing data, and providing services to users. PaperCut uses the Application Server to manage user and account information, manage printers, calculate print costs, provide a web browser interface to administrators and end users, and much more.. For the technical readers, the client makes an XML web servicesWeb services are a standardized way of integrating Web-based applications using the XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI open standards over an Internet protocol backbone. request to the server on port 9191. Most problems relate to either firewalls blocking access or the Application Server's name is not correctly defined. Ensure that:

1. Any firewalling software on the server allows local network access to port 9191.

2. The client.properties file (a text file) lists the correct server name or IP address of the server. If you've used the zero-install deployment option, this file is located on the server in the directory: [app-path]/client/client.properties

The admin user's password is set up on initial install during the configuration wizard. You can change this password post-install:

1. Select Options > Advanced.

   The Advanced page is displayed.

2. In the Reset admin password area, select the Change internal admin password check box.

If you have forgotten the internal admin password, you can reset it by editing the admin.password property in the following text file:

[app_dir]/server/server.properties

PaperCut MF is primarily designed for networks managed under a domain and/or authenticated environments. Peer-to-peer networks or Workgroups are, however, supported. The first option to consider is requiring users to log onto the workstations using their username and password. If this is not possible, an alternate option is to set up the user accounts on system hosting the printers (system running the PaperCut MF server software) and configuring the account selection popup with the Charge to other users option selected. Users can then enter their username and password in the popup that displays each time they print.

Yes. You can start the client software minimized by executing the program with a command-line switch -minimized. See Configuring the User Client using the command-line.

If the user running the client software is configured to either:

• select shared accounts

• confirm the print job via a popup

the client software must be running at all times. If the user is configured in either of these modes, the client software's exit option is disabled. Note: Restart the client software to pick up this option after the user's options have been changed.

PaperCut MF caches group membership by replicating the user/group relationship structure internally in the system. Typically network group membership is relatively static, and is usually set up when a user account is initially created. PaperCut MF tries to be a good network application by avoiding common no-no's such as flooding domain controllers with group lookup requests. This is achieved by caching. Operations such as Bulk user operations, quota allocations, group reports and group filtering all need to do group membership lookups. Caching speeds up these operations and prevents excessive callouts to the domain servers.

The downside to caching is that group membership changes are not immediately reflected inside PaperCut MF. To force PaperCut MF to detect the change, perform a user/group synchronization:

1. Select Options > User/Group Sync.

   The User/Group Sync page is displayed.

2. Click Synchronize Now.

   The system also automatically refreshes group membership overnight during low network activity.

The config area contains all of the PaperCut MF system wide settings. You can change some of these via the normal options interface while others are designed for internal developer use and tuning and are only accessible via the Config EditorThe Config Editor stores information used by PaperCut to configure advanced options and functions. This information is stored in config keys, which are editable by an administrator.. Take care with any changes made in the Config Editor as an invalid entry might require you to reinstall the system!

One of the business objectives of PaperCut MF was openness. The development team actually encourages this and can assist with detailed APIApplication Programming Interface (API) is a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software and applications. An API expresses a software component in terms of its operations, inputs, outputs, and underlying types, defining functionalities that are independent of their respective implementations, which allows definitions and implementations to vary without compromising the interface. documentation. If you want feedback on your ideas, please email our support team. They would be more than happy to offer advice.

Running PaperCut MF on top of an external database is an advanced option. For more information, see Deployment on an external database (RDBMS).

PaperCut MF's internal database is Apache Derby - an open source database written by IBM and based on IBM's DB2 Cloudscape database system. The internal database has proven to scale very well and is suitable for networks of all sizes.

PaperCut MF is developed under a number of languages and development environments. The printer monitoring component and other native operating system interfaces such as user authentication are written in C/C++. The Application Server and web services are written in server-side Java.

The PaperCut MF is designed as a cluster compatible application and supports clusteringClustering allows your organisation to ensure your services are not affected if anything should happen to your main server. PaperCut is a cluster compatible application and is supported under Windows (Microsoft Cluster Server / MSCS, Microsoft Failover Cluster Manager / MSFCM, Vetitas Cluster Server / VCS) and Linux (Novell Cluster Services / NCS, Linux-HA) at all levels of the application, including: clustering at the print spooler service layer by integrating with clustering services, failover based clustering at the Application Server layer using clustering services, and at the database layer by utilising cluster aware databases such as Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, or Oracle. at all layers of the application. For more information on configuring PaperCut MF in a Microsoft Cluster environment, see Clustering and high availability. If you want to investigate clustering options on other platforms (Linux), contact our support team.

If you're utilizing the Print ArchivingPaperCut's Print Archiving stores an historic record of all printed content. This allows approved administrators to browse and review the content of past print jobs within their environment. feature (see Print Archiving (viewing and content capture) , or have otherwise captured a spool fileA print spool file is generated when a user sends a document to a printer. The print spool stores the print job information, and sits in a print queue until it is retrieved and printed by a printer. for debugging purposes - you can print this document by copying it to a printer, using it's full network path.

Windows:

copy /B my-spool-file.pcl6 \\servername\printer

MacOS and Linux:

lp -h servername -d printer -o raw my-spool-file.pcl6