Printing problems with NT Workstation clients

[Jean Francois Micouleau]

On Thu, 29 Jul 1999, Stephan Greene wrote:

> 1) network printer installation on NT workstation.
> 
> I saw this discussed on this list last March - Samba (main tree) can't
> support the RAW printer data and requires installing a real driver on the

wrong, that's the other way around. The spoolss code only support RAW
datas, and doesn't support EMF. But that's a technical fact, that's
totally transparent to users and administrators. Samba forces the NT
client to send RAW data whatever the printer driver is.

> client system. Works great for Win9x, requires user permissions for NT W/S
> that users may lack.  As of late March, I understand the necessary RPC
> code was almost ready to be inserted into the development tree.  Has this
> happened yet?  Are there any workarounds, other than granting the

It has be inserted on April, 27th.

> necessary rights to install the drivers and having them declared in the
> share entry on the samba server?

Now you don't need to grant rights to people to install printer drivers
(like with NT server) but I don't recommand to do it that way. Better to
have the administrator setup the printer drivers on each workstation, so
every users have access to the printers.

> 2) Queue feedback and management
> 
> I think we have this licked - requires defining the printer share with
> guest=no and the user has an account on the box (even if there's no
> password entry).  But this brings me to:

not required with the spoolss code. Joe user is allowed to play with the
queue from an NT WKS as from a Unix command line. Namely Joe user can
remove its own jobs, if Joe user is allowed to remove others print jobs or
stop/start queues, he can do it to from NT.

> 3) syncing accounts on samba with NT domain or eliminate need for accounts
> 
> To support print services, we don't need user accounts on the samba
> server.  But it looks like we'll need them to allow users to manage their
> own print queues (am I correct?) so we need a way to sync user ids between
> the NT domain and samba.  Or eliminate the need to keep user accounts for
> printing (but still retain print queue management).

security=domain is the trick. you make the print server a member domain.

> One kludge would be to periodically dump a list of domain members from the
> PDC to a text file and use the text file to update /etc/passwd.  Any
> better fixes, or do we wait (assuming we can wait) for domain replication?
> it's a BIG site so simplifying management is important to them!

updating the /etc/passwd ? you can use the 'add user script' smb.conf
param.

	Jean Francois