Keeping a healthy system

PaperCut has been around since 1999 and is a very reliable and robust system. One of the design objectives forming the foundation of PaperCut is “self administration”. Where possible, the system should be responsible for it’s own management and maintenance. PaperCut does a good job in this area and normally manual maintenance is not required. However, like all systems, Administrators should make regular inspections and avoid configuration or system changes that might upset normal operation.

The following list highlights some problems experienced by our customers over the years, and explains how to avoid them on your own networks:

• Keep PaperCut NG of MF up to date. We continuously include performance enhancements and improvements to our software with each new version. If your license allows for you to run the latest version of PaperCut NG or MF, it’s always recommended to do so. Head into the ‘About’ tab in the Admin console, and use the ‘Check for updates’ action to see if there’s an update waiting.

• Keep your operating system up to date. No matter which distribution of Linux or version of Mac OS or Windows you’re running, it’s always a good idea to keep up with their latest security and feature updates.

• Keep your print drivers up to date. This one is often over looked in larger environments but can easily play a part in mystery problems if you are running older drivers with problems. Most manufacturers offer either device specific or universal drivers, of which are updated often. Another option is to try our PaperCut Global driver.

• Keep an eye on disk space. PaperCut needs disk space to write log files and update it’s database. Full disks can cause problems with any software, but even close-to-full disks will cause performance issues.

• Have a backup plan in place. Sometimes things just don’t go right and you’ll find your only hope is to restore from a backup. PaperCut NG & MF both have their own automatic backup systems in place.

• Test PaperCut after making large network or domain structure changes. Renaming a domain or making large Active Directory structure changes may affect PaperCut’s user synchronization process. Take a few minutes to test PaperCut (print a few test documents) after making any significant network changes.

• Make a PaperCut health check part of your weekly or monthly system status checks. Take a few minutes to check the PaperCut Application Event log for errors and print test documents to ensure everything is OK.

• Both PaperCut NG and PaperCut MF perform their own database maintenance nightly. This nighty maintenance can be modified to fit your ideal schedule.

  • If you are running the default internal PaperCut database, it may be helpful to run the “db-tools optimize-internal-db -h” command in order to re-index and clear out any empty space in the tables. You can read more about this command in our article on Optimizing your database.

By keeping these points in mind, PaperCut should give you years of trouble free operation. If you’ve been following the above guidelines and you feel like something isn’t right with your server, please have a look at our article on Troubleshooting Server Resource Issues.