Suppress Client Error Notifications When Offline

Help! When my users take their laptops home the PaperCut user client is constantly annoying them with: “Unable to connect to server” error notifications. How can we make this stop?

It’s a common scenario in many organizations for users to take their laptops or MacBooks home for use after hours. If the user client is installed on these machines, an unwanted side effect can be that they may also receive notification messages advising that the client is unable to communicate with your PaperCut server.

Thankfully these notifications can easily be suppressed by turning on the silent option in the user client configuration file found in the following locations:

Running from server share:
[app-path]/client/win/config.properties
[app-path]/client/linux/config.properties
[app-path]/client/mac/PCClient.app(control-click, Show Package Contents) Contents/Resources/config.properties

Locally installed user clients:
[client-install-path]/config.properties

Then follow these steps:

1. Open the config.properties file in a standard text editor, like Notepad

2. Locate the line #silent=Y and remove the proceeding # symbol

3. Save your changes to the config.properties file

4. Restart the user client while the laptop is disconnected from the network to test.

You should no longer receive any pesky error notifications whenever the app searches for a connection on startup!

Note: On Windows, you’ll need to open Notepad by right-clicking and selecting ‘Run as Administrator’.

Note: If you wish to ensure this option is set on the user client before deploying, then just complete the steps above and then follow instructions here:

Windows: Deployment on Windows via silent installer MSI
Mac: PaperCut Client Deployment using Mac Packaging & Deployment Tools