greetings, my hp 2605dn printer using samba as a print spooler from solaris 10 won't print from XP, 2000. i've convinced myself that the windoze boxes ship the print job off to the samba print spooler, but the samba print spooler bitbuckets it. samba 3.0.21b (sun's) solaris 10 printer = hp2605dn windows xp, 2000. using bsd protocol. ping works everywhere, nslookup gives the right answers everywhere. samba file shares work. there is no firewall set up. these machines aren't on the internet, never have been, no plan to put them there. solaris "lp filename" works--the print comes out. if i use the solaris smbclient i can put files to the printer and they do print. this works from the windows box: echo hiya^L > \\solarishost\hp2605 i'm guessing that only works because it's not using samba. or do i not know what i'm talking about. on the windows box i can send print jobs (say, from word) and the printer status box says they are spooling. The jobs leave the window and it looks like the print job worked. but nothing comes out of the printer--it looks like no bytes are sent to the printer. test page printouts from the printer properties pulldown do not work. there is no indication of an error on the windows side. there is no indication of anything getting into the queue on the solaris side, but it's possible it's going by too fast--though i doubt it. it really looks like samba on solaris is collecting the bytes from the windows boxes and throwing them away. i have a "switch" (it's probably just a hub) but the lights to the printer don't flicker. i never see anything in lpstat -t lpstat -o should i? this machine is the print spooler so would the file go to the print spooler first and then to the printer? if so, the flickering lights tell me the file goes to the spooler and is tossed out. is there a way to check that? there is no WINS server set up in the printer. the printer has a dns server, netmask, gateway.... and they are all what i set them to be. aahhh, there seems to be a cadre of people who think using cups will fix this. i have a very slight preference to fixing this w/o cups just to prove i can get it right, but i'm willing to use cups if that's what it takes. j.