samba - Aug 1999 - Your message Re: Samba and printer comments (July 5 1999)

Yes unfortunately I do not have much luck recieving help from the SAMBA
mailing list.

After much playing I found something weird that was seemingly causing
incorrect comments. Most printers would recieve the comment - "no
entries" which originally I assumed to be the default comment given by
Win95 when it could not get a proper comment. However I later found
that this is not the case. In fact when looking at the printer queue on
the unix side (lpq) I found that the status comment was 'no entries'.
The biggest clue to this was when I installed a particular printer it
recieved the comment 'out of paper'!

So it seems that the comment given to a printer in Win95 is 'sort of'
derived from the printer status outputted from 'lpq'. Currently we use
LPRng and in most cases spool to a Novell server sharing printers via
NFS. The output of 'lpq' for printers that spool to the Novell server
is quite different from printers that we spool to directory (via
Jetdirect).

Output of lpq for a printer that spools to a Novell queue:
---
[root@vulcan HP2500]# lpq -Pbaboon
Printer: baboon is MRDS_HP4MV@mr.tait.co.nz
no entries
--

Output of lpq for a printer that it spooled to directly (Jetdirect):
--
[root@vulcan HP2500]# lpq -Ptest
Printer: test@vulcan  'VULCAN test'
 Queue: no printable jobs in queue
 Status: server finished at 15:03:51
--

In the above examples, the printer comment would be set to 'no entries'
for the top one ('baboon'), but would be set as defined in smb.conf for
the second one ('test').

I wonder if this is how it is supposed to work or if it is just a plain
old bug?

Eventually we intend to spool directly to JetDirect from LPRng rather
than spool to the Novell queues so that will fix our problem.

I hope this gives you a clue to what might be wrong in your case.

I have forwarded this message also to the the samba mailing list.

-=-
 Carey Sinclair
 IT Project Engineer
 Tait Electronics Ltd, Christchurch, New Zealand
 Email: carey.sinclair@tait.co.nz     Ph: +64 3 3583399 Ext. 8145




Ian Cameron wrote:
> I found your message in the Samba list archives, and wondered if you had
> discovered a solution to the problem of incorrect printer comments in
Windows
> 95 clients?  I have enabled 3 printers via load printers = true, and all
print
> correctly, but only one seems to have the correct comment on the clients.
>
> I could not seem to find any replies to your query on the list, and
wondered
> if you had either worked something out yourself, or got any replies
personally.

Hi,

Thanks for your response.  The output of lpq seems to give some of the 
answers, but not all in my case!  I have three printers defined, and lpq gives 
the following output for each:

sloe:~# lpq -Plw-s1009
no entries

sloe:~# lpq -Plw-s1020
Kyocera OK 
Rank   Owner      Job  Files                                 Total Size

sloe:~# lpq -Pij-s1019
no entries

lw-s1009 is an Apple LaserWriter 8500 connected as a remote printer
lw-s1020 is a Kyocera FS-3600 connected as a remote printer
ij-s1019 is an Epson Color Stylus 600 on a local parallel port

The whole comment does not seem to come from the output of lpq though, since 
the full comment for lw-s1020 is "Kyocera Laser Printer FS-3600", and
this
does show up in the comment box on a Windows 98 client, but the other two both 
produce comments of "no entries"!

Thanks for again for your response, at least I'm not the only person to have
noticed this!  Perhaps some people on the list might have answers this time?

-- 
Cheers, Ian.

> 
> So it seems that the comment given to a printer in Win95 is 'sort
of'
> derived from the printer status outputted from 'lpq'. Currently we
use
> LPRng and in most cases spool to a Novell server sharing printers via
> NFS. The output of 'lpq' for printers that spool to the Novell
server
> is quite different from printers that we spool to directory (via
> Jetdirect).
> 
> Output of lpq for a printer that spools to a Novell queue:
> ---
> [root@vulcan HP2500]# lpq -Pbaboon
> Printer: baboon is MRDS_HP4MV@mr.tait.co.nz
> no entries
> --
> 
> Output of lpq for a printer that it spooled to directly (Jetdirect):
> --
> [root@vulcan HP2500]# lpq -Ptest
> Printer: test@vulcan  'VULCAN test'
>  Queue: no printable jobs in queue
>  Status: server finished at 15:03:51
> --
> 
> In the above examples, the printer comment would be set to 'no
entries'
> for the top one ('baboon'), but would be set as defined in smb.conf
for
> the second one ('test').
> 
> I wonder if this is how it is supposed to work or if it is just a plain
> old bug?
> 
> Eventually we intend to spool directly to JetDirect from LPRng rather
> than spool to the Novell queues so that will fix our problem.
> 
> I hope this gives you a clue to what might be wrong in your case.
> 
> I have forwarded this message also to the the samba mailing list.
> 
> -=-
>  Carey Sinclair
>  IT Project Engineer
>  Tait Electronics Ltd, Christchurch, New Zealand
>  Email: carey.sinclair@tait.co.nz     Ph: +64 3 3583399 Ext. 8145
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Ian Cameron wrote:
> 
> > I found your message in the Samba list archives, and wondered if you
had
> > discovered a solution to the problem of incorrect printer comments in
Windows
> > 95 clients?  I have enabled 3 printers via load printers = true, and
all print
> > correctly, but only one seems to have the correct comment on the
clients.
> >
> > I could not seem to find any replies to your query on the list, and
wondered
> > if you had either worked something out yourself, or got any replies
personally.
>