I have the following situation at the hospital I work at.
we are a windows shop (not my fault), and as such use windows 2k3 file
and print servers.
Recently passing 400 printers has apparently put too much strain on our
main printserver - called ntprn (been a windows shop for a while).
Okay, so now we are going to split the load amongst two or more
printservers... ntprn1 and ntprn2. Our users have decided that this is
most inconvenient - remembering which server their printer resides on.
The windows admins looked for a while for a solution, but found nothing
easy to implement, and handed it down to me. I thought "Cups can do
this - be a front for those windows servers" and I'm right. it does a
great job of being a face in front of one or more w2k3 server - just
using raw queues, everything is perfect. Again, the issues of the user
rears it head - they don't want to change their printers to this foreign
idea of IPP. Okay, so samba can front for this and pass the print
request to Cups and cups passes it to windows, all should be fine.
Except it isn't. the prints are changing now.
So somewhere in the line of windowsXPclient -> samba ->cups
->Win2k3printserver -> printer, we are changing the output. I'm
trying
to use "raw" queues in cups and just printers=cups in samba.
Prints from WinXPclients directly to Win2k3printserver are the
"control"
Prints from WinXPClients to Cups To Win2k3printserver are exact match
Prints from WinXPClients to Samba to Cups to Win2k3 are different -
fonts are usually smaller, things are bold that are not on the control,
some italics are sometimes missing. I've checked and rechecked the
drivers on the WinXPClients and the Win2k3 server .. tried making more
generic, etc. No difference.
Can someone tell me if this is expected behavior or not? If this is a
known issue, is there a work around?
thanks,
Jack