The laser printer where I work, an HP 8150 series just coughed up roughly 300 - 400 pages of documents can are only relevant as a group from 2009. Anyone have any idea why the printer would just randomly print things from more than 2 years ago? Why are old documents lurking inside the printer and why would they all suddenly print, now, 2 years later?

8/3/2011 1:49:34 PM

It's either Zombies or the Chinese.

Some think these are one in the same, however.

8/3/2011 2:12:19 PM

I know what you did 2 summers ago?

[Edited on August 3, 2011 at 2:17 PM. Reason : LASERJET EDITION]

8/3/2011 2:17:29 PM

Rise of the Planet of the Printers

8/3/2011 2:20:41 PM

Sounds like someone printed the wrong documents and doesn't want to fess up to it.

8/3/2011 2:50:34 PM

^ The documents are too random. There's no way they came from one person.

8/3/2011 3:06:09 PM

i guess theoretically its possible that they were sent to the printer 2 years ago, the print job was paused before they printed, the printer remained powered on for the last 2 years, and someone went into the print queue and unpaused the old batch

8/3/2011 3:47:52 PM

^

8/3/2011 3:56:13 PM

The printer has been power cycled many times over the last two years. In fact, it was power cycled Sunday due to a power outage.

8/3/2011 3:58:17 PM

I'm updating my working theory. We had a power outage Sunday. I'm fairly certain one of our machines wasn't rebooted until this morning. It may have dumped it's ancient print queue to the pointer. How is still a question, but I can see many of the documents printed coming from past users of that machine.

8/3/2011 5:19:12 PM

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/04/19/eveningnews/main6412439.shtml

Quote :

"Nearly every digital copier built since 2002 contains a hard drive - like the one on your personal computer - storing an image of every document copied, scanned, or emailed by the machine. In the process, it's turned an office staple into a digital time-bomb packed with highly-personal or sensitive data. If you're in the identity theft business it seems this would be a pot of gold. "The type of information we see on these machines with the social security numbers, birth certificates, bank records, income tax forms," John Juntunen said, "that information would be very valuable." "

There's your answer, sport.

8/4/2011 1:41:44 PM

Our printer does not contain the optional hard drive. It does contain 7 MB of flash memory, but that's not enough to store all the documents that it spit out.

We boot some more computers that were off due to the power outage and now have another stack of unexplained print outs. Again, all old documents, this time from early last Fall.

Has anyone ever heard of a RHEL 4 machine firing off it's old print queue after rebooting from an unexpected shutdown? Something strange with CUPS perhaps? Nothing turned up on a google search.

[Edited on August 4, 2011 at 3:09 PM. Reason : a question]

8/4/2011 3:06:42 PM

CUPS, especially older versions of CUPS are really bad about identifying when a network printer that had a problem or went offline comes back online. If the queue was stopped, it might be possible for the jobs to have persisted this long until a reboot reset the queues. Don't know if CUPS jobs persist between reboots though.

8/4/2011 6:07:50 PM

^ Given the evidence I have to assume that they do/can.

8/4/2011 6:11:43 PM