samba - May 2005 - Strange Problem with Sharp PCL Printer Drivers

Hi,

we have a strange problem with the Sharp PCL printer driver for the AR-M450.
Someone in the list seems to have the very same problem with a Sharp AR-286
printer. This is what he wrote:

# From: Bob Boehmer <bob.boehmer <at> verizon.net>
# Subject: Problem with Sharp AR-286 PCL Printer
# Newsgroups: gmane.network.samba.general
# Date: 2003-02-21 14:17:40 GMT (2 years, 11 weeks, 8 hours and 52 minutes ago)
# 
# I am having a problem getting the PCL driver for the Sharp AR-286 working.
# This is an LPD network printer. I created a queue on our Redhat Samba server
# using the raw driver. The windows drivers uploaded to the Samba server
# without a problem. But whenever I try to print anything to the printer it
# comes out garbled.

No way to get it working when served over a samba printer share. We had this
problem with samba2 and it is also there in samba3.

When doing the same thing with a Windows 2000 server everything works fine.
There must be a difference in the way samba and windows share printers.

We tried to investigate this by printing the raw data to a file and found this:
When the printer is connected to a samba share the raw data stream generated by
the sharp PCL driver contains some additional starting bytes with causes the
printer to output nothing or garbage. We compared the raw data stream generated
when connected to a Windows 2000 share and found that these strange starting
bytes where missing. Manually removing the bytes and sending the rest of the
data stream to the printer gives us a fine printout.

We notified the Sharp printer support but did not get any response so far.

Is this a samba or printer driver problem?

Thorsten

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Thorsten Greeb wrote:

| We tried to investigate this by printing the raw data to
| a file and found this: When the printer is connected to a
| samba share the raw data stream generated by the sharp PCL
| driver contains some additional starting bytes with causes the
| printer to output nothing or garbage. We compared the raw
| data stream generated when connected to a Windows 2000
| share and found that these strange starting bytes where
| missing. Manually removing the bytes and sending the rest
| of the data stream to the printer gives us a fine printout.
|
| We notified the Sharp printer support but did not get
| any response so far.
|
| Is this a samba or printer driver problem?

My money would be on a driver bug.  I've seen instances where
drivers work with MS servers but fail on Samba boxes due to the
fact the the driver doesn't NULL terminate REG_SZ values.
The Windows server just happens to use a different buffer
size and zeros the memory before sending the reply.  Could
be something similar here.





cheers, jerry
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