In the last two weeks or so, after years of no problems with Samba printing
from Windows machines in our office, we suddenly started having problems with
very slow printing. So far, I have resolved this to two different situations.
In Windows XP, if you would give the netbios name of the server and printer,
as \\SERVERNAME\printername to connect to a network printer on Samba, it
would hang for minutes before it would sometimes connect and sometimes not. I
thought there might be a problem with name resolution, so I bypassed that by
asking for a connection to \\192.168.1.1\printername, where 192.168.1.1 is
the LAN side address of the server machine and lets say 1.1.1.1 is the
Internet interface address of that same server. I found that XP was somehow
trying to connect to 1.1.1.1 when I had specifically asked for 192.168.1.1 !!
It would pop up a windows saying that it was trying to connect to 1.1.1.1 ! I
can't imagine where it is getting that address from, unless it is somehow
doing a reverse lookup on FQDN for the server. ??
In our case, the machine with Samba is not the machine that is the gateway for
the WIndows boxes, so the request would go out the gateway and back in the
*outside* interface on the Samba machine, which is firewalled against access
to M$ printing services from the outside world. It looks like it would
eventually figure it out and go to the inside interface after a minute or
two.
This is making Samba really look bad, but I think it's some sort of side
effect of one of the XP hotfixes in the last week or so.
My partial solution was to put a route in the gateway machine saying that
1.1.1.1 was reachable via the 192.168.1.1 interface on the Samba box.
However, I'm still having problems with some Windows machines just hanging
when you open the "Printers/Faxes" window if you have any Samba
printers
loaded on the machine. Using System Restore to roll back the XP boxes to
somewehre in January and then trying again to print will yield a very slow
print job the first time, then, it starts working properly again from then
on.
Anyone else having this wierdness? Is this a side effect of a Microsoft patch?
Thanks,
Jim
