Weird printing problem on 2300DL

[RogerS]

We have an elderly Konica Minolta 2300DL colour laser printer. It is connected to both our Macs via the network. However, today neither Mac can print to it. On the Mac printer screen I see CUPS ready to print and then the printer puts itself into a pause state. You can hit Resume but it just cycles through back to Paused. Here is what I have done so far.

Power cycled the printer.
Power cycled my Mac
Reset the printer queues on my Mac which clears out all the print queues and printers.

I can ping the laser printer OK
I can print out a testpage via the laserprinter control panel
I can clear out the printer from the Printer setup and re-instal it (which implies some level of comms between Mac and printer)

but I can't print anything...from either Mac! Which seems to be suggesting a problem with the printer? But where do go next.

 

[JakeS]

I can clear out the printer from the Printer setup and re-instal it (which implies some level of comms between Mac and printer)

You'll probably find that all this implies is that the printer is recognised as being on the network. The next thing I'd try here is to actually connect the printer directly to one of the computers with a cable and try printing through that. Hoping that it's not too elderly to support USB! Perhaps the printer's network interface is acting up?

The other thing you might try is a factory reset of the printer. I know my home printer (albeit a fairly recent Xerox) has this buried somewhere in the printer control menu; you don't lose much by doing it on mine, just stats on pages printed and default paper source and things like that. I doubt it'd make much difference, but it's worth a go.

I'm assuming you'll have checked all the obvious stuff like toner levels, paper jams, drawer being shut properly and everything that may result in the printer automatically pausing itself. It may be worth checking to see if you can find the microswitches (or whatever) that the printer uses to determine when the case is open, the paper drawer is open etc. to see if any of them might be falsely reporting a 'do not print right now' condition.

 

[RogerS]

Hi Jake and thanks for the quick reply. This is getting weird. I can navigate to the printer from my browser and tell it to print a test page. That works fine. I fired up my elderly G4 PowerMac and that printed OK to the printer over the network.

So I have two iMacs that until this morning worked perfectly well. Nothing has changed. No automatic software updates. But both now fail to print to the printer.

 

[JakeS]

I fired up my elderly G4 PowerMac and that printed OK to the printer over the network.

Given recent discussions about switches and whiskers and so on, have you tried connecting one of the more-recent computers to the ethernet socket that the G4 printed via successfully? ;-)

(I presume all other network traffic to those two machines is OK, so I doubt it'll help much, but you never know...)

 

[RogerS]

The two iMacs can access the monochrome laserprinter and the internet without any problems.