Slow printing/Server authentication

[Damian Ivereigh]

Tim,

> I recently found that bringing up the print requestor from a windows
> application (Word, Outlook, you name it) can take a long time to display and
> 'freeze'.  In fact it was taking anywhere from 5-25 seconds.  People
> complained.  I looked into the situation and made two changes as suggested
> from the mailing lists: 1) Change the LPQ command to cat out a file that
> echos "no entries" and 2) upgrade to 2.0.6.  Neither of these made a
> difference.

If you are running a couple of hundred printers you must have a very
large /etc/printcap file. This will be loaded in whenever smbd starts
up if you are running it out of inetd. The other problem is that any
browsing will be very slow too.

What we did at here is to divide the printers up into seperate areas
(floors, buildings whatever) and create a seperate "pseudo server
name" for each. Then we created a seperate smb.conf snippet for each
of the these pseudo server names. Then at the appropriate place in the
main smb.conf file we put a line of the form:-

include = <some-dir>/%L.conf

The '%L' is replaced by the server name that the PC is calling this
machine by, thus even though it is all the same *real* machine (same
Ip address), they each get a subset of the printers appropriate to the
pseudo server name, which is much faster to load.

Then you can either register all the pseudo names into DNS/WINS
manually or you can use a line in the main smb.conf file like:-

   netbios name = server1
   netbios aliases = server2 server3 server4

This will register *all* these names with WINS or whatever.

Then if you want to get really fancy you can have multiple print
servers and just move these pseudo names between the servers as load
dictates - very flexible. We run over 3000 printers on 150 servers on
this basis.

Damian

-- 
Damian Ivereigh                   Cisco Systems, Australia
damian at cisco.com                  +61 2 8448 7344

                 "Free your mind."