Printer problem

[Damian Ivereigh]

> 
> i'm running samba 1.9.18_p8 on solaris 2.5.1 and in Windd 3.5
> my samba printers keep on dissepearing from the list, even after
> I do the following trick taht I've read somewhere:
> 1) connect to a samba printer
> 2) delete it again
> 3) create printer and connect to samba port
> 
> It's a nice theory, but it doesn't work that well.
> Any ideas?

Is your problem that the printers on the Win95 clients keep getting
greyed out and going to "work offline"? If you uncheck the "work
offline" (when you right click on the printer) does it come back
sometimes?

If so I think what you are seeing is the irritatingly short timeout that
Win95 puts on its printers. Are the PC's using WINS? Is the samba host
in the WINS table as a static entry? If the answer is Yes & No then you
had the same problem we had.

The problem is that Win95 looks up the name of the server *every* time
it does a status update of the printer window. It first goes to the WINS
database, fails to find it, then goes to dns, then gets the status from
the samba server. It allocates only a few seconds to the whole
procedure. So if your WINS or DNS servers are being slow, it leaves
almost no time for the Samba to respond - Win95 times out and marks the
printer as "offline".

Your best solution is to put the name of the samba server as a static
entry in the WINS database. It is irksome to have to do it - but it does
work.

Hope this helps

Damian 

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