Forms, print queues and tdb

[Damian Ivereigh]

Jeremy Allison wrote:
> 
> Damian Ivereigh wrote:
> >
> > I reckon I have found it! It is NT 4.0 being the evil one. The problem
> > is that
> > these machines were originally connected to Samba 1.9.17 and they do
> > indeed
> > poll. When I swap in the new Samba they continue to poll only now each
> > time
> > they do it costs the machine a lot more. Even if you kill the smbd's
> > NT just
> > reconnects. At least win95 puts the printer into "work-offline mode"
> > and stops
> > polling.
> 
> Ah - ok. Is it possible to remove these printers from the
> client and re-add them with a 2.2 server ? The problem is
> that NT has flagged the server as being a lanman only server,
> and stores this in the registry attached to the printer info.

Yeah that's almost certainly what it's doing. It is possible to get
them re-added, and we will want them to do this so that they pick up
all the latest drivers etc, but only over time (we are talking 40,000
machines!).

Right now I have dealt with it by turning off the queue display if the
load average rises above a pre-set level.

I am also writing a windows prog to do this changeover (i.e. delete
and re-add printers).

> This is the stuff that needs cleaning out on the client in
> order for it to move to the new NT method of lpq notify.

> Alternatively if you can't do this, we might be able to move
> to caching the response rather than trawling the tdb each time,
> I'll have to look at the code to learn more here.

We should probably attack this anyway, since otherwise the perception
is that Samba 2.2 is *much* heavier on the server after an upgrade
from a previous version. And of course we still have win9x's polling
to deal with.

I suppose I would rather attack it by making the db lookup faster.
Since caching at the end of the day is just a workaround. However I do
understand the complexities of speeding up the db.

Thanks for your thoughts on this.

Damian
-- 
Damian Ivereigh
CEPS Team Lead
http://wwwin-print.cisco.com
Desk: +61 2 8446 6344
Mob: +61 418 217 582