[Samba] Windows printer applet fails to list print jobs with spaces in their name

[Gamlin, Brett]

I am currently using samba 3.0.24 on AIX 5.3 in order to share AIX
printers to Windows XP clients.  This is working fine for the most part,
but there is one annoying issue that I have not been able to solve:

When using the windows "printers and faxes" applet on the client to
display the list of jobs queued on a printer shared by samba, the client
will only display print jobs which do not have any spaces in the
document name.  

 

A good example of this is the windows test page which has a document
name of "Test Page".  When this is sent to a samba printer, the print
job is briefly displayed in the windows print queue on the XP client for
a couple of seconds when the print job is first generated, but then
permanently disappears from the windows display once the first refresh
of the display occurs even though the AIX queue is paused and the
document is still in the AIX queue.  Any other documents already in the
AIX queue are only displayed on the windows client if they do not have
spaces in their titles.

 

This can be illustrated by the following example:

 

On the AIX system, the following print jobs are queued:

Queue   Dev   Status    Job Files              User         PP %   Blks
Cp Rnk

------- ----- --------- --- ------------------ ---------- ---- -- -----
--- ---

wbridge null  DOWN

              QUEUED     73 space in name      root                   4
1   1

              QUEUED     74 no_space_in_name   root                   4
1   2

              QUEUED     75 Test Page          operator               2
1   3

 

But when viewed from the windows client's printers and faxes display,
the only job shown is job 74:

Document Name     Status    Owner   Pages   Size     Submitted
Port

no_space_in_name            root    N/A     4.00 KB  10:41:07 AM
2/10/2007 

 

Does anyone know of a solution or workaround that will allow all the
queued jobs to be displayed on the windows client?

 

I can change the print command that samba uses to enqueue windows print
jobs to translate all spaces in titles to underscores, but this does not
help at all if a print job is generated from other sources.

I have not yet got 3.0.25c to work successfully on AIX so have been
unable to verify if the problem still exists in that version.

 

Kind regards

Brett Gamlin