The mystery of the vanishing print job

Chris Watt grimm at mad.scientist.com
Sun May 23 00:11:29 GMT 1999


	I suppose I should start by saying that the system is running a fresh
installation of RedHat 6.0, and I've done so little that I'm amazed that
I've managed to do something wrong ;)
	I have a genuine article postscript printer (an old QMS PS-410 for what
it's worth) connected to lp0 and setup as "lp" such that when I type "lpr
somefile" somefile is printed out. I have Samba 2.0.4b installed, I can map
shared directories (no trouble accessing files) and the printer on the
local Windows machines. I have set the printer up as a postscript (default)
printer on my Windows box, and when I tell it to print something it happily
humms along, if I have the control window open for the printer I can see
the print job appear briefly, then it vanishes, as though it had printed,
but nothing comes out of the printer. . .

I end up with a message in /var/log/messages along the lines of:
May 22 20:43:39 tito PAM_pwdb[642]: 1 authentication failure; (uid=0) ->
cnww for samba service

Which strikes me as odd since I know I have the right password (I've
already connected to and accessed files in my home directory, in fact the
data files for this mail reader reside in my home dir on tito), and I also
know that the user ID (which I assume is what uid is referring to) for cnww
(me) is 500, not 0. . .
In an effort to fix things, I set the [printers] block up as follows, with
no productive results:

[printers]
   comment = All Printers
   path = /var/spool/samba
   browseable = yes
# Set public = yes to allow user 'guest account' to print
   public = yes
   guest ok = yes
   writable = no
   printable = yes

At this point any suggestions (especially relating to the totally obvious
thing I seem to have missed) would be welcome.
--

Q:      What's tiny and yellow and very, very, dangerous?
A:      A canary with the super-user password.



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