Restart stuck printers on remote CUPS servers
Our CUPS servers tend to, from time to time, get stuck sending data to a printer. Once this has happended, the server pauses the printer, which leads to angry calls, since the server continues to accept jobs for said printer without notifying the Windows client machines of its status. Instead of configuring CUPS' webserver to accept connections from other machines (or using SSH -X to start a local browser), this problem can easily be solved using good old plain SSH.
- SSH into the machine running CUPS.
- Run
cancel -a <printer>to clear the printer of all jobs, usually they accumulate some jobs until someone bothers to notify me. - Run
cupsenable <printer>to unpause the printer.