adddriver spoolss woes

REILLY,JOHN R (HP-Roseville,ex1) jreilly at hp.com
Mon Jan 7 07:07:12 GMT 2002


Benjamin -

> Hi John,  Sorry for the late reply for this, but my samba email
> (that's not addressed to me) gets archived, and yadda yadda yadda
> ... I basically dont expect email that much =)
> 
>  The source for the pscript.dll file I was using was on the Windows
> NT workstation installation CD, d:\i386\pscript.dl_ ( I was assuming

Ahh. Well, if you were using the .dl_, that explains it. These are
Microsoft compressed files (you can find the expand.exe utility
somewhere in the system32? dir). When drivers are installed via
the MS Add Printer Wizard, these .??_ files are expanded. Samba
cannot (more accurately, does not) do this expansion. 

> that files are stored in this directory with the last character
> of the extension changed to an underscore, as most of the data
> files are saved like that ). I hadn't thought this was a problem
> until now because everything seemed to be working until now, but
> I'm thinking this is  because every workstation had been ignoring
> the file because they already have a copy? Whatever.

Possible.

>  I've since found a pscript.dll file elsewhere that starts with
> 'MZ', and 'adddriver' seems to work now. Thanks for your interest.

See notes above.

>  Would you know of any plan to install printer drivers by means
> of accessing the tdb files directly? I'm thinking about hacking
> one up, once I get around to digging deap enough into the samba
> code =)

No plans. There are bigger issues with accurate driver installation
that *require* that initialization code run on the Windows client.
The driver has knowledge about the capabilities of the printer built
in, and it can only be extracted by calling entry points in the 
config DLL. Samba cannot run the DLL from a Linux platform, as the
driver is free to use any Windows API it chooses to.

>  Bj
> 
> -- 
> +-------------------------------+--------------------------------------+
> |      Benjamin (Bj) Kuit       |  Building 4, 447                     |
> |      Systems Programmer       |  Faculty of Information Technology   |
> |      Phone: 02 9514 1841      |  University of Technology, Sydney    |
> |      Mobile: 0416 184 972     |  Email: bj at it.uts.edu.au             |
> +-------------------------------+--------------------------------------+

Cheers
JohnR  --  John R. Reilly --  jreilly at hp.com, samba.org




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