IT/Procedures/Printer Maintenance/Script to prevent printhead drying out

Printer Maintenance Script

About the Issue

A lot of effort has been taken by several people to create a reliable script that prints a test page on all printers every few days.

This should prevent the ink drying out which renders the printer unusable.

So far this feat has not been fully achieved yet :(

How is it setup?

• the script runs every few days as a cron job on the cnx server
• several scripts are under /home/walt/.scripts/PrinterMaintenance
• crontab -e to check which one is active at the moment
• the newer ones are set to create some logs in the same folder (*.log)
• most if not all scripts try to print with lp and check somewhat with lpstat what's around (printers and/or open print jobs)

What is working so far

• there's a script that prints over the access point mode of the printers
  • caveat is that the printer need to be set to ap mode, then back again for normal use
  • so far this was used as a "holiday setup"
• the other scripts try to print over wlan connected to the router
  • this seems to work "mostly" well, at least with the MG3670 printer models
  • depending on the mood of the printer, it will not print anything at all

The Issues

• some printers occasionally just don't print anymore and pile up jobs (check lpstat)
  • though this also happens with "legit" reasons, e.g. no paper or printer error
• printers sometimes "dissapear" from the network and are no longer visible through e.g. lpstat -v
• so far no reliable way has been found to resolve the issues automatically

New Approaches

• printer-maintenance.sh
  • uses a static list of all printers (so no printer is "forgotten" if it dissapears from the network)
  • checks if a printer has any unfinished jobs and deletes them (lprm [PRINTER] -)
  • sends a new job
  • waits 1 min, then checks for unfinished jobs again
    • if there are some, this will be logged
    • those printers then need manual maintenance (or just more paper)
    • sending of notifications could be added (e.g. mail, telegram or line webhook)
  • if it works well, will merge with printerPurge.sh

Useful Commands

• lp
• lpstat
  • -e
  • -v
• lprm [PRINTER] -