Another (Wasted) day…another dollar. Its not unheard of for a typical IT person to rant about dealing with printers. It seems they’re constantly the bane of any admin; not printing, needing special treatment, buggy drivers, buggy settings, etc. I often think I’m immune to a majority of the issues; I’ve been through EVERYTHING, fixed it all, and hey if I can get 1960s teletype machines working, I can get a friggin modern printer working. Well today, I was put back in my place…
Problem: Copiers (Canon) with Fiery print servers on them. Working fine, but recently changed dns servers, where DHCP was updated with the new DNS settings, and confirmed the printers received them and were talking to new DNS server. Decided to do a “scream test” by temporarily shutting down old server, and lo and behold, the printers lose connection to Papercut.
Despite all references to the old DNS server being gone, the printers were still trying to talk to it, and turning on the old DNS server immediately brought back connection.
After spending nearly all day troubleshooting, checking logs, settings, and even going so far as to mirror the switch port on the printer, all I could confirm was that despite having all the right settings, the copiers were still reaching out to the old DNS server. I used DNS debug logging to confirm this.
I could have taken the easy road and just set the machines to use the Papercut server’s IP address, but that still won’t answer WHY it’s not working!
Interestingly, one machine out of the bunch started working properly, and kept it’s connection despite the old server being shut down. Something had to change, and after wracking my brain, I realized that I went into the DHCP settings in the Fiery control panel, set it to “manual”, then set it back to “automatic”, which prompted to reboot the Fiery. I tried the same steps on another affected machine, and after waiting nearly 10 minutes for the Fiery to reboot, it finally came up, and worked fine. There was my fix.
Answer: So it seems that even though DHCP was set to automatic for both IP and DNS settings on the Fiery print server, somewhere it was being ignored, and manually flip-flopping the settings and rebooting the Fiery server seemed to be the answer. (Nothing was actually changed; both settings were already set to on automatic, but I simply set DHCP to manual, then set it back to Automatic), which then prompted for a reboot.
Note that non-Fiery machines were not affected.
The ultimate moral of the story: Printers suck.