samba - Apr 2003 - Queue Control and Cups

I have also posted this to the CUPS general group, but thought that it was 
also a relevant post for this list.

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I have samba-2.2.8a on RedHat 7.2. This has been a stable setup for quite 
some time, printing works as advertised. However, attempting to control the 
queues and print jobs is another story. As an aside, the Linux box is a 
domain member that does pass through authentication to the WinNT PDC, 
winbindd is not running. Users are added to the unix passwd file on an as 
needed basis.

I have compiled samba with cups support. In smb.conf there is printing = 
cups and printcap = cups. When a print queue is opened on a Windows 
machine, select Printer::Pause and the status reports "Error processing 
command". I have never been able to properly control a queue in this 
manner. I have added the windows user group as printer admin = @group in 
smb.conf, so all uses are effectively printer admins. If I don't open a 
printer queue and instead right-click and choose Pause Printer, I get a 
message saying, You do not have permissions to control this printer, see 
your network administrator. Even though I am an admin on the windows box, 
and have tried adding my win username as root equivalent with username map 
=  in smb.conf.

OK, so it is a permissions issue. I edited cupsd.conf to allow access to 
all areas of the cups setup (Admin, Printers, etc) without authentication, 
restarted cups, and the problem still persisted. I set the system group to 
that of the windows users, problem still persisted.

After trying to use native CUPS APIs with Samba, I decided to use printing 
= lpr and printcap = /etc/printcap. Now, I can execute shell commands to 
try and control the queues. In this manner I am able to pause a queue by 
executing  /usr/bin/disable %p On the linux box executing lpq -P 
PrinterName shows that the queue is not ready==paused. However, the windows 
spooler does not recognize this fact. The printer shows up as ready. ?? I 
am therefore unable to resume the queue because all of the commands in the 
Win GUI still say "pause" instead of resume since the Win computer
does not
know the printer is paused.

Essentially, does anyone have Samba and CUPS working to the extent that 
they can pause and resume queues with the Windows GUI, as well as 
pausing/resuming/deleting jobs from the queue list? I was under the 
impression that using the Samba and CUPS integration, that this would "just
work", but not for me so far.

Thanks,

     --Ben--

----------------------------
Ben Griffith
bgriffit@email.unc.edu
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For anyone looking for answers to this problem, here is what I learned.

An answer from the cups.general newsgroup:
> Pausing and resuming print queues is an administrative operation in
> CUPS.  Since SAMBA's access to CUPS is not authenticated, it is not
> generally possible to control queues via SAMBA.
>
> That said, you *could* use the following in cupsd.conf:
>
>     <Location /admin>
>     Order deny,allow
>     Deny from all
>     Allow from localhost
>     AuthType Basic
>     AuthClass System
>     Satisfy any
>     </Location>
>
> to allow unauthenticated access on the local machine; I don't know
> if it will work in general, but administrative users listed in the
> system group (default is sys, system, or root depending on your OS)
> should be able to do it.
>
> CUPS 1.2 (currently in development) offers administrative policies
> so that you can allow start/stop printer operations for all users
> but limit other admin access.
     --Ben--

----------------------------
Ben Griffith
bgriffit@email.unc.edu
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