Waking up a sleeping printer

The printer (a Canon CLC 3220) at my office takes quite some time to warm up and calibrate after waking up from sleep mode. Anyone who wants to print out something at the beginning of the work day knows this. And it can be quite stressful if you have to get something out for an early morning meeting.

Currently sleep mode is activated after four hours of inactivity. A quite reasonable time I think. So instead of fiddling with the sleep setting I added the following line to the crontab of our server:

   0    7    *    1-6,8-12     1-5    echo | lpr

This line prints an empty page every morning at 7 each workday, except in july when the office is closed. Thus the printer is calibrated and ready to go when people start arriving at the office around 8 in the morning.

Our server is an Xserve running OSX and for this to work I had to install the printer drivers on the server. Also setting the printer to default helps I think (though I didn't have to since we only use one).