Kurt Pfeifle
2003-May-03 07:01 UTC
[Samba] Version 0.81beta4 of Printing Chapter for Samba 3.0 HOWTO Collection available
[crossposting to Samba, CUPS and Linuxprinting mailing lists...] Hi, the Draft for the Printing Chapter of the new Samba 3.0 HOWTO Collection. is now updated to version 0.81beta4.It is available at http://www.linuxprinting.org/kpfeifle/SambaPrintHOWTO/ A PDF version (for convenient printing) is also there. Here is my Changelog: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 01-05-2003: corrected typos add a very lean smb.conf example work on other smb.conf examples how to use "testparm" to discover "hidden" settings how to set default driver values for all clients sketch out a logon script to install printers without user interaction 02-05-2003: add paragraph about "tdbbackup" 03-05-2003: extended explanation for adding drivers remotely (APW + rpcclient) added info about how to find out which driver files are required added info about how to get hold of the driver files added info about running "rpcclient adddriver|setdriver" manually ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Samba 3.0 HOWTO-Collection is due for publication alongside the Samba 3.0 software release, probably sometime in May/June. The complete collection of docus is already greatly enhanced and extended, compared to the 2.2.x versions, and so is the printing part. Please help further polish it: read it - use it - test its advices & recipes - feed your suggestions back to me. This way you can help to make the Samba Printing Documentation a better one. (You may also learn a bit from it at no cost at all... ;-) The most recent PDF version of the complete HOWTO Collection is (until final release) available at http://samba.org/~jht/NT4migration/Samba-HOWTO-Collection.pdf and also in the Samba HEAD CVS. (Note that this does *not* *yet* include my Samba Printing HOWTO part....) The printing draft contains 15 ASCII art flowcharts trying to to clarify and explain various aspects of Windows --> Samba printing and of CUPS printfile processing. However, I am not able to convert this into something "nice". So here goes the call to all who are willing and able to help out with their abilities to use one of the Free Software drawing or graphic programs: Please provide some better illustrations for this important documentation. Thanks, Kurt
John Gerth
2003-May-09 02:08 UTC
[Samba] Re: Version 0.90beta8 of Printing Chapter for Samba 3.0 HOWTO Collection
I apologize for the long delay in responding, but I suddenly was flooded with problems that needed immediate attention. I hope my comments aren't arriving too late. First, I want to say that I'm very impressed with both chapters 6 and 7. They are both terrific and will undoubtedly be a great aid to many people. I particularly like the detailed explanations of the various types of print pipelines because when you're trying to isolate a problem it's important to know where things might go wrong. What I intend to do with this note is to offer a few additional things which we have encountered here at Stanford. This is probably due to our desire to have a reasonably centralized set of printers for use in a Computer Graphics Lab: a) which is fairly evenly divided between Unix/Linux and Windows b) where the vagaries of doing research mean that we can't enforce uniform versions of any operating system c) whose people often install/administer their own machines We have been using Samba for many years, but with the advent of the SPOOLSS support and CUPS, we find that printers are much easier to configure and use. We are also making some progress at understanding how to use printers in a more mobile world as many people now carry their notebook computers from campus to home to conferences. In what follows, I will not attempt to actually submit paragraphs for the HOWTO document. Rather I will write about the topics and trust you to incorporate the information as you see fit. Finally, if what I send is unclear or incomplete, please do not hesitate to ask me for additional input. /John -- John Gerth gerth@stanford.edu (650) 725-3273 fax 723-0033 ********** Printing in our heterogeneous Unix/Windows environment Our environment consists of a few hundred machines mostly running Win2K/XP and Redhat 7/8 Linux, but with several dozen legacy Unix systems (largely SGI), a number of Apple Mac OS/X machines, and the odd Win98, WinNT, HP/UX, etc. system. Users typically have an identically named id in Unix world and in a single, traditional Windows NT domain (with a Windows PD We force all printing to go through Samba 2.2.8a and CUPS 1.17 server on single server running RedHat Linux 8.0. CUPS is configured to allow remote IPP and lpr printing. The legacy Unix machines use lpr and Windows machines use either SMB printing via Samba or IPP to CUPS I will explain later why we do both. Our stock of printers changes every year and consists of roughly two dozen machines which are now all driven by JetDirect protocols. The current inventory includes various HP and Epson inkjets, a number of B/W and color HP laserjets, an HP 3500 DesignJet plotter, and a Kodak dyesub. *********** Samba and CUPS configuration A standard Samba/CUPS configuration with "disable spoolss = no" and "use client driver = no". The print server has a disk share for "print$" and also a "drivers" share which contains vendor packages of drivers for those who must install local versions. Two users have "printer admin" status to set printing defaults and upload drivers. Since we have no need for page accounting and because we had problems with "cupsaddsmb" in earlier releases, Windows machines are virtually all using the vendor drivers. The only non-obvious smb.conf setting was that we found that APW sometimes takes the value of "server string = ..." as path. Setting "server string = /" seemed to keep APW from getting confused and hanging. For consistency, the CUPS definitions for the PS printers come from the same vendor PPDs. Of course, we do use the full CUPS pipeline when printing to Epson inkjet printers from Linux/Unix. Since CUPS will honor any /etc/cups/*.types file, we can configure raw printing for our Epsons by adding a new file rather than changing mime.types. In our case, it contains: application/vnd.cups-raw string(0,<0000><001B>) This is a useful feature since it insulates us when updating CUPS from rpms. Although the CUPS developers are understandably reluctant to distribute a lot of extraneous mime.types, I think it might be a good idea for Samba to provide a sample "samba.types" file which contains the signatures for popular raw types like Epson. ************ Seeing print server properties As you've noted, it's very tricky to get the drivers uploaded correctly to the Samba Server using the Windows GUI tools. One thing we found that seemed to help was to navigate to \\samba-server\Printers and then use File->Server Properties to get to the various dialogs. This has the advantage of letting you not only look at a list of all the installed drivers, forms, ports, etc. but you can use the Properties of each driver to see all the files and where they are stored under the print$ directories. This can be useful when debugging and also when looking at forms definitions. ************ Setting defaults for spoolss printers Of course the real nice thing about spoolss printers is that a "printer admin' can use the "Device Settings" tab and then the "Advanced -> Printing Defaults" dialog to make sensible settings (like duplex for printers with duplexors) or to have the correct default forms. This is a real advantage over the old client driver days when you had to remember to configure each printer each client. ************ When to use IPP or lpr printing on Windows Sometimes it's better not to use networked SMB printers on Windows. The main reason is that Windows is easily put in states of contacting printers to check on the queue. If you have a notebook computer which is often off the network or attached to separate networks without WINS service, then you have to endure many mysterious hangs as the print systme waits for network timeouts. This can be particularly nasty for some Windows applications which will try to check *all* printers when constructing their print menu. In situations where SMB networks might not always be available, you can make things better by using IPP or lpr ports to talk to the CUPS system. I believe the reason is that these ports look "local" to the print spooler and so it doesn't keep polling them for queue data and/or the print monitors are smarter about connectivity issues. With IPP ports, you have more control over the authentication ids. And since the non-SMB ports are "local", the printers appear for all users which is nice for a public machine (not as nice as your logon scripts, but useful when we can't enforce a domain logon).
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