Home Ethernet Phantom Printing Jobs

  • Thread starter Thread starter Bob Morehouse
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Bob Morehouse

For some unknown reason, every now and then we get spontaneous print jobs
showing up and the printers start printing out a line or two of random
characters and eat up every single piece of paper in the printers. We will
tell the computer to cancel, but a little later it will then pop up a
message that the printer is out of paper or not communicating (because we
turned it off!) and it can't start yet another worthless print job. We are
having to keep the printers off until needed, or pull the paper back until
we actually want it to print. This is happening when no one is doing
anything with any of them, and with more than one machine.

There are 6 computers on the network: pentium 233 tower w/98SE (with
printer, shared), pentium 266 laptop w/98SE, 486dx120 w/WFWG, 486dx100
laptop w/W95b, pentium 1000 w/WinXP (with printer, shared), and another
slower pentium with 98SE (recently had printer added, not sure if shared
'cause I didn't hook it up). The last two are usually turned off unless in
use.

They are all on the same ethernet workgroup connected to a D-Link router (or
a D-Link switch that goes to the router) and then to a D-Link cable modem.
Most of them are using D-Link cards, except the 486dx100 laptop and the
486dx120. It's really annoying when you forget to turn off a printer, and
then come back a little later to find it empty and all the pages have just a
few lines of junk on them.

Anyone else ever have this happen and figure out why? It's hard to know
whether something is coming in on the internet that is causing it, or if a
rogue program on one of the computers is initiating the random print jobs.

Bob
 
Bob Morehouse said:
For some unknown reason, every now and then we get spontaneous print jobs
showing up and the printers start printing out a line or two of random
characters and eat up every single piece of paper in the printers.
Click to expand...

Bob
Click to expand...


If my memory serves me this is the result of corrupt drivers. It seems
that they print all sorts of things including card suit symbols!. Try
updating the printer drivers for all of your network PC's.
 
Bob Morehouse said:
For some unknown reason, every now and then we get spontaneous print jobs
showing up and the printers start printing out a line or two of random
characters and eat up every single piece of paper in the printers. We will
tell the computer to cancel, but a little later it will then pop up a
message that the printer is out of paper or not communicating (because we
turned it off!) and it can't start yet another worthless print job. We are
having to keep the printers off until needed, or pull the paper back until
we actually want it to print. This is happening when no one is doing
anything with any of them, and with more than one machine.
Click to expand...

This sounds like the Bugbear virus to me. It spreads via network shares but
was a bit crude and tripped up on printers.

Have a look at http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/articles/bugbear3.html

Cheers

T.
 
Another possibility; Printers have a sizable memory buffer and some can
store many pages of text internally. If someone gets a corrupted print job
for whatever reason, the data may remain stored in the printer's buffer,
even after cancelling the print job in Windows, and it will try to print it
every time the printer is turned on. If the printer does not have a
buffer/memory clear routine (ie. in the printer itself, not in Windows) you
would have to disconnect the power to clear the data from its memory. After
that the printer should be okay. For a permanent solution, try to isolate
the source of the print job corruption.
 
Another possibility; Printers have a sizable memory buffer and some can
store many pages of text internally. If someone gets a corrupted print job
for whatever reason, the data may remain stored in the printer's buffer,
even after cancelling the print job in Windows, and it will try to print it
every time the printer is turned on. If the printer does not have a
buffer/memory clear routine (ie. in the printer itself, not in Windows) you
would have to disconnect the power to clear the data from its memory. After
that the printer should be okay. For a permanent solution, try to isolate
the source of the print job corruption.
Click to expand...

Another possibility is the bugbear virus. See
http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/[email protected]
 
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