How to Enable Debug (collect logs) in the Site Server

PaperCut has special debug options which cause PaperCut to produce a very detailed text log of activity. The log allows our Support Team and 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.

Introduced in PaperCut version 15, the Site Server is an optional component which can be deployed to provide resiliency for a distributed deployment. In short, Site Servers can be deployed for each geographically disparate location (with appropriate licensing), each of which is then configured to synchronise with your primary Application Server over a WAN connection.

In the event that the Application Server becomes unavailable, be it due to system failure or the WAN link going down, a Site Server will step up to maintain the majority of application services for local users in regional offices. Site Servers ensures continuous availability of printing resources to support key business functions over unreliable network links or during unplanned network disruptions

If there is an issue with the Site Server availability, PaperCut historically wanted to ensure that all the logs for the particular problem were captured. For this reason we had enabled debug mode by default on all Site Server from the point of installation, from version 15.0 until version 18.2.1.

From version 18.2.1 onwards you will need to manually enable debug mode manually like all other PaperCut components.

Enable or disable debug mode on a Site Server

If you have been requested by the PaperCut Support Team to send the Site Server debug logs, start by logging on to the relevant server and navigate to the following location, where [app-path] is the local PaperCut NG or MF installation directory: [app-path]\server\

1. Open the site-server.properties file, make sure to remove the # before the entry and then edit the following line accordingly:

2. Enable Debug: server.site.debug=Y ( or Disable Debug: server.site.debug=N )

3. After this, save the site-server.properties file and then restart the PaperCut Site Server Service for this to come into effect.

Changing server log rotation on a Site Server

When debug logging is enabled on sites with a large volume of printing or a heavy use of hold release queues, they may find that the logs rotate very quickly (e.g. in less than 20 minutes). This can cause problems when PaperCut support is trying to help diagnose problems because the logs rotate too quickly, meaning the important data is rotated/deleted before it can be captured.

Since there is no admin interface with configurable options for a Site Server, we need to make this change directly to the site-server properties file.

1. Open a text editor ‘as administrator’.
2. Use File-Open and browse to [app dir]\server\site-server.properties file.
3. Add the line server.site.log.keep-mb=<Size in MB> (eg 6Gb=6144 or 10Gb=10240)
4. Restart the Site Server service.

Sending your debug logs

Debug mode changes are logged to the server.log files within the Site Server installation found in: [app-path]\server\logs.

Simply zip up the entire contents of the logs directory! These files will probably be too large to email, so if needed, ask us to provide you with a link that you can use to upload the zip archive to us directly (hint: when you raise a Support ticket to us, you should have received the upload link in the acknowledgement email from us).

Please include an explanation of the steps taken, along with any other other information requested by the PaperCut Team. If you can, record the following information:

• Date and time of the print job that demonstrates the problem
• Name of any printed documents
• Username(s)
• Printer Hostname & IP Address
• Client Machine Hostname & IP address, which sent the job to the printer

All of this information will help the Support Team and Developers match up debug log entries with your test activity. Additional information such as what was observed or what was expected, screenshots or relevant videos are always appreciated!

By the way: your log files and other information you send to us will be treated with care in accordance with our privacy policy.

Note that Site Servers also includes the Print Provider with it. If debug logging is required for the Print Provider which runs locally on the Site Server, this will still need to be enabled separately. The instructions for enabling debug for the Print Provider can be found here.

Please also see Reporting Problems