Prevent jobs being released when using hardware checks and a printer is in error

… or “How to block the release of print jobs to printers in error with Hardware Page Count (hardware checking) enabled”.

PaperCut allows you to prevent the release of jobs to printers that are in error from the following Release Stations:

• Web-based release stations - enabled with the release-station.block-web-release-on-printer-error config key (see Prevent jobs being released from a web-based Release Station when a printer is in error ).
• Standard Release Stations - enabled with the block-release-on-printer-error property in config.properties (see Prevent jobs being released from a Standard Release Station when a printer is in error ).

Note: PaperCut MF also allows you to prevent the release of jobs from MFDs (device release), but this article relates specifically to web-based and Standard Release Stations.

As of version 17.4.2 of PaperCut NG/MF, the Print Provider on Windows print servers can be reconfigured to use SNMP to check for printer error states, instead of solely relying on updates from the Windows print queue. Using SNMP based detection, as the Print Provider does by default for macOS and Linux print servers, may result in error states being reported more quickly and responsively. If you’re finding that some print jobs are being improperly released before an error state is discovered to have afflicted the relevant print queue at that point in time, you might want to test enabling the ErrorPollMethod=snmp option found in the print-provider.conf on your Windows print server.

If you don’t have hardware page count validation enabled, it should work just fine so you don’t need to read any further. Even if you do have hardware page count validation enabled, it should be fine if you have NOT modified either the:

• list of errors to ignore in the hardware check (specified in print-provider.conf under HWCheckIgnoreErrors=)
• list of errors that will prevent the release of jobs (specified in ‘ext-device.block-release-on-error.snmp-error-list config key)

If you have hardware page count validation enabled and you have modified either of the error lists, grab a coffee as you have a bit more work to do. You need to make sure there are no errors included in both error lists. If there are, you need to:

1. Decide whether you want to exclude the error from the hardware check OR prevent jobs being released when the error occurs—you cannot do both.
2. Remove the error from one of the two lists.

Note: The name of the error states excluded in hardware page count validation are not the same as the error names used to block jobs from being released to devices in error. The table below provides a mapping of the hardware page count validation error state and the equivalent device in error state.

Error name mapping