samba - Dec 2006 - config of failover machine backing multiple samba print servers

Hello,

in our organization we have a number of print servers scattered across
several organizational units and departments. These servers are
configured in a similar fashion (Samba 3+CUPS, raw print queues,
point-and-print drivers for clients, authentication backend in a
centralized directory).

We had this idea of trying to set-up a machine in our central offices,
for providing fail-over printing service. Upon notification of the
failure of a print server, a manual procedure would be performed and the
failover machine would impersonate the failed print server. We hoped to
achieve this by configuring samba with multiple virtual servers. We
would enable them selectively (upon real server failure). We want the
possibility of having more than one of them enabled at the same time (in
case of a specially bad day).

However, we found no joy in our attempts. Impersonating a print server
requires replicating the ntprinters.tdb (and possibly other .tdb files).
The problem for us is that, in a Samba instance, just one ntprinters.tdb
is queried, not possible to keep a separate one for each virtual server.
I'm not sure if adding the content of all the ntprinters.tdb keys in a
single ntprinters.tdb would work (and don't know how to do it)

Is all this just a bad idea? Or maybe can be done somehow?

cheers,

David