How To Fix PaperCut Printing Issues

Jason Moore

PaperCut is a print server and in this document, I will show how to fix the various errors we have seen in our environment.

Introduction

PaperCut is not your typical print server. It lives in the cloud for all that implies, so they call it cloud printing. It works pretty well too and uses all the clients that we installed it on to route print jobs. The clients are called nodes in their terminology. Basically, it creates a mesh of light print servers.

Status and Issues

To check if everything is operational in the cloud, go to https://status.papercut.com/. This will give you a quick overview of any problems. It is helpful when you diagnose a user print problem.

Invalid Authentication

So, let’s get to the issue at hand. When a user experiences this problem at their printer, they are using their badge to print. This is using the Print-Anywhere service. To fix, follow these steps:

  • Physically look at their badge and the badge number. It is a 7 digit number.

  • Open the PaperCut admin portal and search for the user in question

  • There is a section for badge numbers, primary and secondary.

  • Make sure their badge number is in the primary spot

  • Go to AD and make sure their badge number matches up in there

This will change immediately. No need to wait for anything to sync. Also, if you cannot look at their badge, Ad should have the correct badge number in it. Well, it should anyway.

Printer Failed To Install Correctly

This is an annoying issue for users. They will almost always think they can not print after seeing this. However, the printer usually shows up, anyway. According to PaperCut, this is a bug in their software and they are releasing a fix soon. Not sure of the timeline on that, though. If the printer is in the user’s list, it should be ready to use. It is just a reporting error in the PaperCut server.

Sign In With Google

Some of our users use Google instead of Microsoft products. PaperCut allows the use of Google account sign-ins. Sometimes there will be errors in the logs. When this happens, authentication with Google accounts will not work. So, this is not a complicated issue. PaperCut says to restart their service on the server and this fixes the issue.

Using A Pin To Login

This is another issue which was hard to pin down. Printers would not install correctly from the PaperCut client on the users’ devices. I am attributing this fix to Mason, as he identified this issue and found the fix. Nice job! The resultant fix was to quit using a pin to log in to a device. This really messes with things. So the user would need to log out, restart their device, and then log in with a password. Sometimes, we even had to repeat this before Windows cooperated.

Conclusion

PaperCut is a good print server. As with anything, there are always issues. Hopefully, this will be a growing document of problems and fixes as we encounter them.