Copiers & Devices Connecting to the Wrong IP Address

As part of communicating with external systems such as photocopiers and similar hardware, PaperCut will sometimes be required to tell the external system what IP address it needs to use when initiating communication with PaperCut.

This is done by obtaining the list of IP addresses on the machine and determining which one is most relevant to use. This is known as the Primary IP address.

It looks like this in your [app-path]\server\logs\server.log

# System details: max memory: 910.5 MB, processors: 4, free space: 116,681.5 MB, uptime: 0.13 minutes, hostname: papercut, IP addresses: [10.100.65.1, 192.168.110.1, 192.168.163.1, 192.168.56.1, fe80:0:0:0:8890:2ac3:4481:d434%11, fe80:0:0:0:7d6d:75fd:fb11:8b90%15, fe80:0:0:0:59aa:fe2c:ff88:f6e5%16, fe80:0:0:0:fd8a:3a29:d046:e754%21] (Primary: 10.100.65.1), runtime: 1.7.0_60-b19, time-zone: Australia/Sydney, calendar: GregorianCalendar, locale: en_AU, encoding: windows-1252

In the above example PaperCut is listening on all of those IP addresses (IPv4 and IPv6) but will use 10.100.65.1 when telling a copier/device which IP address to use to talk back to PaperCut.

Option 1 - Windows - Adapter Order

On Windows this is determined by the order for the Adapters and Bindings.

Option 2 - Using the “Server address presented to users” option

PaperCut can be configured to manually define this IP address (or FQDN) in the PaperCut Admin Console → Options → Advanced → Server address presented to users

More here: Chapter 33. Advanced Server Management

Option 3 - Manual override in PaperCut

Customers using older versions of PaperCut may need to use the PaperCut Config Editor you to modify the following config key: system.network-address

More here: Chapter 33. Advanced Server Management

Option 4 - Force PaperCut to listen only on one IP

Modifying the [app-path]\server\server.properties by adding the server.listen-interface configuration option will force PaperCut to only listen on that IP address (if available).

More here: Chapter 33: Changing the network interface that PaperCut listens on

I tried all of that and it didn’t work!

At this point you may want to contact PaperCut Technical Support or your PaperCut reseller for further assistance.

But first, check your hosts file for an edge case situation.

If in your [app-path]\server\logs\server.log you see that the Primary: 10.128.140.1 is not in the list of IP addresses, check that your hosts file doesn’t have an entry that overrides our detection processes.

As an example:

# System details: max memory: 910.5 MB, processors: 4, free space: 116,681.5 MB, uptime: 0.13 minutes, hostname: papercut, IP addresses: [10.128.140.21, fe80:0:0:0:c90f:8335:a6ba:edd9%14] (Primary: 10.128.140.1), runtime: 1.7.0_60-b19, time-zone: Australia/Sydney, calendar: GregorianCalendar, locale: en_AU, encoding: windows-1252

In the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts file there was this entry:

10.128.140.1 papercut

This was a hold-over from a DNS issue that the customer had previously. Commenting out this line allowed PaperCut to work again.