I checked through the archives and I didn't see this one. This has been
driving me absolutely crazy for months now and I finally tumbled to what was
going on.
I get hesitations of up to 2 minutes from some of our XP machines when
printing to a printer on the Samba server.
My first suspicion was that it was some kind of name resolving issue. I tried
using the domain name of the Samba server (we have an 'inside' domain
set up)
and that fixed some of the XP boxes.
Yesterday, I got a complaint from a person who was getting the 2 minute delay
before printing and I ran over to his office and put in the DNS name of the
inside interface (the LAN side) of the Samba server in the "Add
Printer"
thingy. Still got a 2 minute delay and "Access Denied" stuff.
OK..I said...I'll short this out...I hate to do it, but I'll use the IP
address of the Samba server and it won't have to look up anything. Still 2
minute delay before printing!
Then I noticed that XP had changed the ip address shown in the "Printers
and
Faxes" icons. Huh? That's the OUTSIDE interface of the Samba server.
That
server is a gateway also and has two interfaces, one on the internet, one on
the LAN. XP was changing the IP I gave it (the inside IP ) and replacing it
with the outside IP!
Then it hit me that it was getting "access denied" because it was
trying to
access port 138 through the firewall! Of course, port 138 is blocked to the
outside world. I noticed that there had been quite a number of IP packets
bouncing off the firewall rule that blocked 138. Hmmmm...
So, I added a rule that says that packets emanating from our outside IPs
(inside addresses would be NAT'd to the outside IPs) can be sent to port 138
on the Samba box and Voila! Instant printing! The packets are apparently
going to the Samba server, being NAT'd to the outside interface and now they
can come back in on port 138 and it works.
Does anyone know what in the world is going on with this? Why would XP change
the IP. By that I mean you say \\192.168.0.1\printername when you set up the
printer and you look at the icon and it says \\The_Outside_IP\printername.
Thanks!
--
-Jim
