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Printer's Won't Stop!

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19 replies

by inletgrovehs

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Have any of you experienced the problem with HP Printers when they start to print page after page of ASCII characters until they are shutdown for a few minutes along with the computer it is attached to? We have several printers that do this on varying operating systems. Any idea what is causing this or how it can be stopped?

19 replies

by mrafrohead

when this is happening, is it just printing a single line of rubbish on the page at the top???

If that is what is happening, your network is now infected with a virus.

Go here: ------> http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.bugbear@mm.html

Download the fix there and follow the instructions and that should fix your problem.

Though if you are not having the problem that I described above it will probably be something else that is wrong. But I am 99% sure that you are dealing with BugBear...

Mrafrohead

by jkaras

Either that or are they printing a whole page of garbage text? If so the person sending the print job could be selecting the wrong printer driver.

by tomsal

First, know that this isn't an *HP* printer issue, this is a printer issue in general. It can happen on any brand printer - I've experienced it on Canons, Epsons, Lexmarks and most frequently our 3 b&w 40ppm Lanier 5645's.

It is a printer driverissue (at least it was for us).

We had some users sending print jobs with a PostScript driver to a printer configured for PCL printing.

When we installed the proper drivers, the problem went away.

Also, I learned a second reason that will cause this -- simple a corrupt print job/or a massive job that exceeds available memory dump space in the printer spooler.

The latter was told me over the phone from a Lanier tech support rep.

by admin

pages...! hehehee yep, a too big job will do it even in a good system :)

by tomsal

Newbie excel users often print a spreadsheet that is hundreds or even thousands of pages long..lol...then I tell them the concept of defining a print area, instead of printing thousands of blank rows and columns with their whopping 6 row , 3 columnsof real data.

lol.

by inletgrovehs

I don't believe it is being caused by a virus, since it only does it occasionally (or is that what the virus does?). However I will give that a try.

I don't believe it to be a driver issue either (unless there is a lone computer out their that someone else has setup these printers on). There is more than one printer having this problem (but not many).

Install new ink / toner cartridges? Do you think that is the problem? It is occurring with both DeskJets and LaserJets.

by joanne lowery

My immediate thought was that this could be a virus, but the problem would occur on all of your printers in a random process. Bugbear looks for shares in a network and can be a pain to remove since you need to make all devices stand alone and then clean them all before reconnecting the network.
However, a previous comment mentioned the available file space to create the spool. Have you checked the free space on the partition where your printer spool is created? If you are unsure where the spool is created, open the printers folder, then select "server properties". You will see a tab which specifies the printer spool location. If you are seriously short of space you can relocate the spool onto a partition with more available space. Note that this requires a reboot though.

by mrafrohead

It won't do it to all of the printers. It will do it to all of the printers that the infected users have access to.

And I don't mean installed printers. But all printers in their node that they potentially have access to connect to. Any other printers that they do not have access to will not be infected.

Mrafrohead

by mrafrohead

The other printers that this is happening to.

If they are all connected to the same node. Then yes, it will be Bugbear. Now if you have different printers in different nodes that are having the same problem then the odds are narrowed down a little bit more that it could be something else.

What you will need to start to do is match up users with nodes. Find out what users belong on which nodes. If you have printers in more than one node that are printing then you will want to verify ifany users are authenticating on more than one node.

The great thing about Bugbear is this. ONE computer can be infected and that ONE computer can cause all of the printers on the nodes that they have access to to print rubbish.

This happens because the virus is trying to find more networked drives. When it finds the printer, the virus isn't smart enough to distinguise the printer from a drive. So it sends it information as if it were a drive, the printer see's the information doesn't know what it is or what to do with it, so it does what a printer does best. It just prints what it is seeing. And then when you see it you wonder, what the **** is THIS??? And then when it keeps on happening, it gets worse.

You're going to want to take a gander at all of the machines on your network. Best thing to do is show up before anyone else. Allow users to sign on ONE at a time. Once the printers start to print rubbish, then you have a narrowed down area to start to find the virus.

You WILL need to remove ALL infected computers from the network while cleaning them. Remove them before you start your work, or you will just be fixing things you've already fixed.

Hope that this helps you a little more.

Mrafrohead

by admin

whether or not you can find, modify or write one that works will be the challenge :)

by mlayton

...by turning off the printer instead of deleting it from the queue. When the printer was turned on, the beginning commands for the print job were gone and so now its printing in garbage. This is especially common in older printers. Don't let people turn off the printers to get rid of a print job - have them cancel it at their terminal or on the print server.

by punkita

I had that happen to me just yesterday and I deleted the printer and reinstalled it and that fixed the problem.

by madroxxx

I had a guest user plug into our network and this started happening to me. The first page of asci characters had one line of text that said "this program can't be run in dos mode".
The cause turned out to be that he had the BugBear virus.

by mc_user

Have you tracked down the user who is sending the document and/or the specific document that is causing the problem? It sounds like someone may be attempting to print a executable or compiled file instead of the intended document. Or they may be trying to print a document formatted by one application using an different application.

Just a few line of compiled code can produce pages of printed ascii garbage.

by inletgrovehs

Well the problem with figuring out if it is the virus is the fact that it is a High School with about 500 students (most all of whom use the computers throughout the day). We have the same number of computers (if not more) and 30+ printers. However it only seems to be a certain few that have the problem. All of the students have the same access rights to most of these printers.

by mrafrohead

I posted a link above for a utility to check and clean for the virus. What I would do is this:

Assemble your IS staff. Tell them that they get the splendid job of working this weekend when no one is in the office.

From there, go in with diskin hand and check each and every computer in your network.

The scans take about five minutes per machine. After you're done with that, you're good to go.

Remember though, if you allow that virus, if it is a virus, to run rampant in your network, you can also propogate it throughout the net also. That would be very irresponsible to not make sure that you are clean.

mrafrohead

by mc_user

In your origional post you said that you used various OS's and that you had to shut down both the printer and the computer to clear the problem.
In this last post you mentioned access rights. How are things configured?

How is your network set up? Are these printers shared off of a server or are they directly connected to the PC's?

In your last post you said that "a certain few" have the problem. Are you talking about PC's, printers or users?

If these printers are on a print server then you should be logging the print job information and have someone yell for you then next time the problem occurs. Don't let them touch anything before you can find out all about what job started the problem this time.

As soon as you find out what what is causing the problem to start, you can use that trigger to start knocking off the possible problems. First clar the PC for virus' and then test. Check for a bad driver installation and then test. Check for a bad/corrupted OS installation and then test.

Do you have a second (good) PC and printer combo that mirrors the faulty system? Compare the two systems and their OS's to see what differences there may be.

Eliminate on possible error and then test. Repeat until the problem resolves itself. (Then ghost a copy of that configuration for later. To see if something crept in.)

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