samba - Jul 1999 - Win98/HP Printer problem. Partially Solved.

I set up a print/fax server here using RH Linux 6.0, and Samba 2.0.3. The
printer is an old (but still very reliable) HP Laserjet 4. Printing from
the Linux box using lpr works fine. However, whenever someone tries to
print from a Windows98 box through SAMBA, there is an extra page printed
on the end. This gets really annoying to the users, more so because the
extra pages cannot be put back into the printer as they become slightly
curled and jam almost every time.

I set up a "print command = cp %s /tmp/print.%s" in order to see what
the
heck was happening. Looking at the file reveals an odd bit of code at the
end of every (PCL) job:

^L^[E^[%-12345X

The ^L seems to be required to push out the last page, but the rest of it
appears to make an extra blank page print. Very strange. This code isn't
generated by Ghostscript when the users print out Postscript stuff.

To get around the little extra page problem, I just popped a filter into
the printcap file which runs sed and removes the extra garbage.

So: before SAMBA, the Win98 Print Server worked fine. After SAMBA (but
before filtering), there was always an extra page from the Win98 clients
even though the Linux printing worked fine. Questions being: is this a
problem with SAMBA? Should it be pretending to handle printing like the
old Win98 Print Server? Is there a better (or more elegant) way that any
one knows of to prevent the extra page from printing when using SMB
clients if this isn't a problem with SAMBA?

Thanks for your help,

Kevin.

On Fri, 16 Jul 1999, Kevin Everets wrote:
> ^L^[E^[%-12345X
>
> The ^L seems to be required to push out the last page, but the rest of it
> appears to make an extra blank page print. Very strange. This code
isn't
> generated by Ghostscript when the users print out Postscript stuff.
^L is a formfeed
^[ is an escape, (which I'll write as [ESC] to ease reading)
[ESC]E is a PCL RESET command
[ESC]%-12345X is a PJL prefix (usually followed by a command), for
example:

[ESC]%-12345X@PJL EOJ

is a PJL end of job command, which tells the printer to prepare for
the next job;

[ESC]%-12345X@PJL ENTER LANGUAGE = PostScript

is a PJL language switch command (to PS, obviously).

PJL (Printer Job Language) is primarily helpful with HP printers which
have multiple personalities (i.e. PCL and PS).

Anyway, it looks to me like the entire job is not making it to samba, as
the PJL command is missing.

I would suggest printing to a file on the Win98 client and look to see if
there is more PJL code in the file the client actually created. Then
you'll need to figure out where it's gone to.
> To get around the little extra page problem, I just popped a filter into
> the printcap file which runs sed and removes the extra garbage.
You may wish to *ADD* '@PJL EOJ', instead of using sed to remove the
'extra garbage'. I'm not sure if it matters, however. I would at
least
leave the PCL Reset ([ESC]E), as this can prevent the printer from being
left in a strange state. I suppose that's what the PJL EOJ is for too...

                                [Darrin]

--
"I have no special gift. I am only passionately curious." - A.
Einstein

Darrin M. Gorski, Research Computer Systems Network Support
Scientific Research Laboratories, Ford Motor Company
Internet: dgorski@ford.com | Tel/Fax: +1 (313) 248-3753