Troubleshooting incorrect or missing printer statuses in PaperCut Pocket / Hive

“Help! A printer on our PaperCut Pocket instance is showing an incorrect status such as out of paper or offline. How can we stop this from happening or find the cause?”

PaperCut Pocket/Hive have a mechanism in place to automatically detect when a printer is in an error state, such as being unreachable or lacking the critical consumables to perform a print job; namely paper and marker supplies. After all, what use is a printer if it can’t print?

Whilst all efforts are made to ensure the status is correct, there may be occasions where an incorrect status, such as paper out or tray open will show. The current status of a printer can be checked on the Printers tab by hovering over the dot:

Requirements

• The IP address of the printer must be correct within the Printers tab.
• SNMP v1/2 read-only must be enabled on the printer.
• The SNMP v1/2 community name must be set to public.

Troubleshooting Steps

Under the hood

We monitor printers using low priority and high priority edgenode leases… So what does that mean?

PaperCut will try and assign up to 5 edgenodes to monitor each printer, it will try and fill all five of these leases which will be valid for up to 24 hours, after which time the edgenodes will check in with us and will be reassigned. These are regarded as low-priority leases and can be reassigned at any time.

High priority leases are are assigned to the edgenode which discovered the printer during printer discovery tasks. These edgenodes will be guaranteed a full 24 hour lease and can sometime take over the lease give to a low priority edgenode.

Still have questions?

Let us know! We love chatting about what’s going on under the hood. Feel free to leave a comment below or visit our Support Portal for further assistance.

For more information about PaperCut Pocket and Hive, check out the PaperCut Pocket and Hive Help Center.