Neil Hoggarth
2006-Apr-15 11:04 UTC
[Samba] Is printcap information required if no [printers] share?
Hi folks, I have a print server, running SPARC Solaris 9. I've just upgraded from Samba 3.0.10 to 3.0.22 and immediately hit system load issues which appear to be related to the use of "lpstat -v" to determine the available print queues. There are about 70 Unix print queues on this system. Running "lpstat -v" can take something like 20s of wall-clock time. lpstat itself doesn't use much in the way of CPU cycles during this delay, though it is possible that busy work is going on elsewhere (lpsched daemon?). I got the load on the server back under control by creating an /etc/printcap file that just listed all the queue names, one per line, and pointing the global "printcap name" parameter at the file. System load fell back to "normal" levels very rapidly following this change, and the system became much more responsive. I then started experimenting to see if I could get away without maintaining a separate printcap file. It happens that I don't use a [printers] share - each of my print shares is explicitly listed in its own smb.conf section, so it occured to me that Samba possibly didn't need to be able to enumerate the available queues at all. I tried setting "printcap name = /dev/null". This seems to work, based on initial testing: all the print shares still show up when I browse my server; I still see all the queues in my servers "Printers and Faxes" folder; I can still print to the queues successfully. However, I thought I'd post this query to double check that there aren't any pitfalls that I haven't discovered yet. Does Samba make any use of the list of queues that it automatically determines at startup, other than for expanding the [printers] magical share? Regards, -- Neil Hoggarth ------------------- Computing Manager, Sherrington Building Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics - University of Oxford, UK