'Filter' Failed When Printing

[mstydel]

We are having a hard time printing PDF's this school year using Monterey on both Intel and Apple Silicon machines.  Most are stopping in the print queue with a "Stopped - 'Filter' failed" error.

The only way we've found to get them to print most of the time is to do a Save As and then save as a JPEG.  This is occurring with both direct print queues as well as print queues we share from a Windows Server using generic PostScript drivers.  Most research (which doesn't show many recent discussions) shows to reinstall or update the drivers, which I've tried with our direct print queues, and also to try a right click>Reset Printing System and then reinstall printers, which I've also done with no change.  Because this is happening with both manufacturer drivers as well as the Generic PostScript driver, I'm guessing it's a macOS issue?  I did update one of my laptops from 12.4 to 12.5.1 in the process of troubleshooting and found it removed all of my print queues and I had to reinstall them all.  At first I thought maybe this was an indication that Apple fixed something in the update, but not so, the issue is still present.  The only other work around besides saving as a JPEG I've found is to print from Adobe Acrobat, which also points to a macOS issue possibly?  I've found in Console that process cgpdftops is crashing each time I send a print job that stops:

-------------------------------------
Translated Report (Full Report Below)
-------------------------------------

Process: cgpdftops [76596]
Path: /usr/libexec/cups/filter/cgpdftops
Identifier: cgpdftops
Version: ???
Code Type: ARM-64 (Native)
Parent Process: cupsd [73007]
Responsible: cupsd [73007]
User ID: 26

Date/Time: 2022-08-29 12:14:28.7003 -0500
OS Version: macOS 12.4 (21F79)
Report Version: 12
Anonymous UUID: 0FCA6CA9-690C-C831-0F99-42F04A32A341

Sleep/Wake UUID: 30038BE6-B52F-47D3-A2F9-CD1D1E48F703

Time Awake Since Boot: 290000 seconds
Time Since Wake: 5417 seconds

System Integrity Protection: enabled

Crashed Thread: 0 Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Exception Type: EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000
Exception Note: EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY

Kernel Triage:
VM - Compressor failed a blocking pager_get
VM - Compressor failed a blocking pager_get

Is anyone else running into this with Monterey?  At this point I think we're going to have to start using Adobe Reader instead of Preview to get by for now.

[AJPinto]

Check to see if the servers were patched for printer nightmare around the time your issues started. This does scream drivers or printer nightmare to me.

I would spend my efforts troubleshooting this in cups directly rather than macOS's printer GUI. To enable cups webUI run the command below and navigate to http://localhost:631/printers/. 

cupsctl WebInterface=yes

You can also try to map the printer with encryption disabled. I would not do this for anything other than troubleshooting.

smb://ServerName/PrinterQueue?encryption=no

Alternatively you can change a current mappings encryption 

Run This command to get the printers info.

lpstat -v

Then run the following commands to enable and disable encryption.

lpadmin -p printer_name -v "smb://server/printer?encryption=yes”

lpadmin -p printer_name -v "smb://server/printer?encryption=no”

Microsoft Patched printer nightmare back in 1st quarter of 2021, and enforced it in 3rd quarter 2021. If you guys have automatic OS updates disabled on your print server, the printer nightmare update could have been installed whenever. As per usual Apples "security focused" nature apple was way behind Microsoft in patching Printer Nightmare. In 3rd quarter 2021 printing to Windows Print Servers from macOS Broke. You had to change a registry value on the Windows Server to restore printing by disabling encryption on the Windows Server's print authentication. With macOS 12.2 apple finally updated macOS's printing authentication to accommodate printer nightmare changes on Print Server, this would break printing with Windows Servers with the registry adjustment to allow unencrypted printing. Of course in typical apple fashion none of this was documented in their patch notes. If this is related to printer nightmare focus on printing encryption on macOS (ideally you want it enabled), and the RpcAuthnLevelPrivacyEnabled key on the Windows Server (ideally you want it set to 1 for encryption to be enabled).

Managing deployment of Printer RPC binding changes for CVE-2021-1678 (KB4599464) (microsoft.com)

[mstydel]

I did try changing several printers to disable encryption but didn't get any changes.  I can't say for sure when this began, I have been running Monterey on both of my Macs since it's release and haven't had issues until recently (and only with PDFs).  I didn't know it was an issue until a few weeks ago when we got a help desk ticket on it, then I tried the PDF they were printing on my Mac and sure enough, same thing.  We updated our print server to Windows Server 2022 from 2019 this spring, so not sure when we would've gotten the update for Printer Nightmare but I'm guessing it's already part of 2022?

[JollyRed]

We were having a similar "Filter Failed" issue with our Canon copiers as the Jamf captured print queue hard codes the driver version. Just simply installing the latest driver would not work as we had to update the existing printer queue to the new drive under the Cups web interface at https://localhost:631 then recapture it to deploy new mappings. We have started including the captured driver version in the comments session of the captured print queue to help denote what drive should be deployed with the queue. 

Not sure if that 100% identical to your issue but it sounds fairly close.

[mstydel]

I have tried removing a copier that was added to my Mac by Jamf and then manually adding it by IP after updating drivers thinking I might need to do that to get it "properly" mapped with the updated driver, but no change either.

[mstydel]

Bump

[JollyRed]

When you are printing these PDFs are they just from Acrobat causing this issue? I ask as I have seen an issue with Acrobat attempting to print causing a font issue with the work around being to set Acrobat to print as image instead. 

[mstydel]

No we are just seeing it from Preview, actually.  Well Firefox, Chrome, etc as well.  Only when using Adobe can we get most PDF's to print now.

[JKingsnorth]

We are having the same issue. We use PaperCut and 2 Print Queues (one color, the other mono) to print to all of our copiers. We've never had a problem until MacOS 12.5 with how we map printers and create PPD files. 

I've found this issue is only with PDF files that contain fonts that are not on the local machine. If I open a PDF with MS Word, it removes the font and just uses a generic Calibri or Arial and then prints just fine.

We've tried printing these PDF's from Preview, Reader, Chrome and Firefox and every time it results in Filter Failed. However we restrict use of Adobe Reader because it causes issues with printing PDF files with PaperCut; so the temporary solution of setting it to print as an image does not help us. Seems to be an issue with fonts and/or security from what I'm seeing.

[JKingsnorth]

@mstydel any headway on this? We are still having the same exact issue.

[mstydel]

Nothing so far, our "solution" so far has been to package Adobe Reader DC and put it in Self Service for teachers to install if they're having issues.