Throughout the day my network printer spits out a page that has a single line of characters at the top of the page. I used the navigator on the printer to pull up the print history and for all the jobs that we want to print it shows an origin, (John's computer, Mikes's computer etc.) but for the gibberish it shows nothing.
Any ideas?
It's a Canon Imagerunner Advanced. There are two paper sizes but it only prints out on 8.5x11, never 11x17.
Also, there are three different pages that will print out and the line of gibberish is the same for all of that type.
12 Answers
Vulnerability scanners can trigger this behavior. It can happen when testing a few different printer ports. Most commonly it is port 9100, used for RAW printing. It accepts everything sent to it as a print command, including the penetration test. All the junk the scanner sends out can come out of the printer on paper! Ideally, I would want to turn off this feature but it's commonly used by Windows. If you can't disable RAW printing then you need to exclude printers from your scans.
Gibberish in printouts…
I'll give you some background, so you understand what's going on: When you connect any device to a computer (let's say a printer.. of course) the computer doesn't know what that device is.
This is where the hardware of the computer detects the hardware that is being connected, on the port of the computer, and in order for the two to communicate, they need software to work as a translator, so to speak.
These are obviously called drivers. Now, drivers are specifically written for a certain hardware model and version and they tell the computer what the hardware is and what it can do.
In the case of a printer, it needs to know how to print the characters, it uses this thing called PDL (Page Description Language)
In a nutshell: Uninstall and reinstall your printer drivers. If that doesn't work – and for network printers, it usually doesn't – install the PostScript Drivers for your printer model from your manufacturer.
Assuming there is nothing faulty with your printer's main controller board you should find that the gibberish disappears.
Let me know how that went.
