cups now says "job completed" but nothing is sent to printer; was working fine

Question

Brother HL-L5200DW connected via wifi set up easily and printed fine for over a year. Now all I can print are test pages and config info from the printer control panel. Afaik things look normal on that panel, and eventually it lapses into "deep sleep" when I stop trying to use it.

cups 1.7.2 on Ubuntu 16.10 says "job completed" immediately when I try to print anything, even an administrative test page, and files with names like c00208 accumulate in /var/spool/cups with those timestamps, but nothing is sent to the printer; no attempt seems to be made to contact the printer, and no error message appears in the cups admin environment.

I don't know what might have changed, other than normal package upgrades. Around the time the trouble started I had downloaded the Brother app to my Android phone, but never could get it to print anything, so I deleted it. Now I have a new phone which has never had the app on it, afaik. I suppose it's possible that the app caused some misconfiguration somewhere, but I don't recall there being any communication between my Ubuntu laptop and the Android phone, or installing any brother ppa links. I have purged and reinstalled cups. I see a 15K-line file with this:

D [19/Dec/2019:23:49:52 -0800] [Job 145] Removing document files.
D [19/Dec/2019:23:49:52 -0800] cupsdMarkDirty(---J-)
D [19/Dec/2019:23:49:52 -0800] cupsdSetBusyState: newbusy="Dirty files", busy="Dirty files"

which might have been generated when I fired up cups to look at the logs, but seems odd.

I don't know what to try next. Any suggestions? TIA

Answer 1

This same sympton I have experienced with another Brother model DCP-T310.

First I tried installing the printer by installing the Brother's drivers from a .deb file (using Ubuntu 20.04). So CUPS would see the printer, if I would power if off, CUPS would notice that, but whenever sending a test page, the Job would appear as completed, but nothing was being printed in the end.

After some forums, I found that the .deb for the drivers is not enough. I finally solved it by using an installation tool from Brother, which is a bash script. Running that solved my problem. You can find it for the model DCP-T310 here, but I'm sure there will be a similar one for yours.

Hope this helps...