Knowledge Base

Please also see Reporting Problems

PaperCut has special debug options which cause PaperCut to produce a detailed text log of activity. The log allows our developers to inspect the internal workings of the PaperCut application and pinpoint the cause of problems. Enabling debug logging is only usually required or requested by the PaperCut Support team.

The Print Provider is the component in the PaperCut n-tiered architecture that interfaces with the print queues. It is the layer closest to the printers and hence debug here can help diagnose monitoring related problems.

On Mac or Linux which interacts with CUPS, there also exists 2 processes called: pc-event-monitor and pc-connection-monitor which also add debugging output to the common Print Provider log file and is also enabled in the common Print Provider configuration file.

To enable debug in PaperCut Print Provider:

1. Open the file:

2. Under the line #debug=on add the line:

Or simply remove the # comment from the existing line.

3. Save the file.

4. Some components may need to be restarted before debug logging is enabled.

• If running Windows: restart the PaperCut Print Provider Service under Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Services.
• If running Novell iPrint: restart the Print Manager from iManager.
• If running Mac or Linux CUPS: no restart is required for the Print Provider. However, when debugging the pc-event-monitor or pc-connection-monitor (as advised by support), please restart them:
  • On Linux, this can be achieved by running as root:
    # /etc/init.d/papercut-event-monitor restart
  • On Mac, this can be achieved by either rebooting the Mac server or running as root:
    # launchctl stop papercut.pc-event-monitor; launchctl stop papercut.pc-connection-monitor
    (note that these processes will be automatically restarted after you stop them).

5. Print a few test documents from a network workstation, or perform the problem action. Try to select a situation that is likely to cause the issue being investigated.

6. Record the approximate time of the problem and/or the name of any printed documents (or the time you performed the test action). This will help the developers match up log entries with your test activity. Additional information such as what was observed or what was expected would also be useful.

7. Zip and email all the Print Provider log files:

            [app-path]/providers/print/[platform]/print-provider.log*

8. Disable logging by reversing step 2.

Categories: Debugging, Troubleshooting

keywords: secondary server debug log diagnostics

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