New printer spontaneously prints nonsense

Hello everybody,

[apparently I had no problems for a long time and was a satisfied Manjaro user, anyway, when I came back here I found that my account no longer exists … but hello, here I am again :hugs:]

these days I have set up my new printer, a Kyocera MA2100cfx under Manjaro with a CUPS driver and it does what it is supposed to.

But I have a massive problem: when it is switched on for a longer time, it spontaneously starts printing rubbish. But it’s “my rubbish”, single pages from PDFs, logos (enlarged to full page), parts of mails and so on. Things that I can somehow relate to, but don’t remember ever actually printing them out. And the printed pages are also much older than the printer.

In the meantime, this has happened three times; it was always the same pages and the process was only stopped by the fact that there was no more paper in the supply.

There is nothing in the printer queue that I could delete.

So: where do these print jobs come from?

Is there a cache that I can clear?

I would appreciate any solutions because I don’t want to empty my toner cartridges by printing nonsense.

Hopeful Greetings,
Andreas

/var/spool if I recall correct

only the spool dir.

I don’t have a printer connected - so I cannot check - but print settings may have an option to keep failed jobs - which - to a degree - would count for the abrubt printing jobs suddenly emerging.

But it may also be remnants - so to speak - data which has long been deleted may resurface a filesystem check have restored what was supposed to be deleted by then the journal entry became invalid and the filesystem took the backup which contained references to old data which then became new - at least to the print spooler.

But that is guessing - as you haven’t mentioned what filesystem has been used for root.

Welcome back - yes the forum removes inactive accounts as a sceduled task.

1 Like

@linux-aarhus: Thank you for the answer. Yes, in addition to the most recently printed documents (as PDFs), there were some cryptic files (in an unrecognisable format) which I now have deleted.

Let’s see :nerd_face:

By the way: My filesystem is ext4 …

I hope that your solution will be successful … I will report.

Greetings,
Andreas

Unfortunately, the suggested solution (@linux-aarhus: thanks again!) did not solve the problem.

I still have to switch off the printer immediately after the intended print job so that the same nonsense is not printed again and again.

Further suggestions are very welcome.

Greetings,
Andreas

Then it is the wrong printer definition you are using.

Possibly printer memory error

In the sense of “wrong printer driver”?

Greetings,
Andreas