Patch for smbclient for printing with Intel inBusiness print stations

Wim Verhoogt wim at queron.nl
Wed Aug 1 15:22:30 GMT 2001


L.S.,

I've been struggling to print with Intel InBusiness print stations. These
stations are labeled as "for use with Windows only" by Intel.
I found out that they emulate a Windows machine exporting two printer
shares, one for each connector. The NetBIOS name of the stations is the
Device ID, and the shares are file://device_id/Printer1 and
file://device_id/Printer2
I tried to print to these shares with smbclient's print command, but
received various errors.
Some reverse-engineering (tcpdump is your  friend :-) ) showed that you have
to specify a remote filename of DEV\LPT1 (or  DEV\LPT2 for the 2nd share -
haven't tested that), and that SMB_COM_WRITE (0x0B)  must be used to write
to the share. Smbclient uses WRITE_COM_ANDX (0x2F). This doesn't return an
error, but garbles the print data.
I've patched smbclient to support this. I implemented a new option (-H)
which will direct smbclient to write using SMB_COM_WRITE. The put command
can now be used to print to the InBusiness stations. The print command won't
work because it doesn't support specifying a remote filename.With this hack
and a CUPS backend script, my server now exports 3 printers, connected to
these stations, and I'm happy :-)
I was wondering if this new feature of smbclient can be incorporated in some
way in the
official SAMBA distribution, so that I don't need to patch smbclient for
each new release. I doubt that the new -H option is the best way to do that,
it just happened to be a quick and easy way to solve my problem.

The patch used was:

--- client.c Fri Jul  6 04:01:20 2001
+++ /home/wim/cvs/samba/source/client/client.c Mon Jul  9 16:33:41 2001
@@ -79,6 +79,7 @@
 BOOL prompt = True;

 int printmode = 1;
+BOOL inBusiness_hack = False;

 static BOOL recurse = False;
 BOOL lowercase = False;
@@ -1031,8 +1032,10 @@
    DEBUG(0,("Error reading local file: %s\n", strerror(errno) ));
    break;
   }
-
-  ret = cli_write(cli, fnum, 0, buf, nread, n);
+  if (inBusiness_hack)
+      ret = cli_smbwrite(cli, fnum, buf, nread, n);
+  else
+      ret = cli_write(cli, fnum, 0, buf, nread, n);

   if (n != ret) {
    DEBUG(0,("Error writing file: %s\n", cli_errstr(cli)));
@@ -2415,7 +2418,7 @@
  }

  while ((opt =
-  getopt(argc, argv,"s:O:R:M:i:Nn:d:Pp:l:hI:EU:L:t:m:W:T:D:c:b:A:")) !=
EOF) {
+  getopt(argc, argv,"s:O:R:M:i:Nn:d:Pp:l:hI:EU:L:t:m:W:T:D:c:b:A:H")) !=
EOF) {
   switch (opt) {
   case 's':
    pstrcpy(servicesf, optarg);
@@ -2571,6 +2574,9 @@
    break;
   case 'b':
    io_bufsize = MAX(1, atoi(optarg));
+   break;
+  case 'H':
+   inBusiness_hack = True;
    break;
   default:
    usage(pname);







More information about the samba-technical mailing list