Information on Printer driver uploading/downloading and printing

[Christopher R. Hertel]

I don't actually know a lot about the printing subsystems in CIFS.  I do
know that there are three different subsystems.  The original native-SMB
system doesn't pass printer drives so that's not an issue for you.  I'm
not sure if the RAP-based printing system hands drivers back and forth.  
Most likely, though, you're dealing with the MSRPC-based system.  That has
been an area of active research and development for quite some time now.  
It is ugly stuff.

There was a tutorial on the subject given at last years CIFS conference:
  http://www.cifs2003.org/conference/program/presentations/carter.pdf
Also you can look at (and listen to) the presentation given at the 
Samba/XP conference last year:
  http://sambaxp.org/sambaXP_2002/archive.html
...look for "The Printing subsystem in Samba".

Both were excellent presentations.  I think, however, that the material
will only help you to realize how completely awful the MSRPC-based
printing subsystem really is.  You may find it much easier to work around 
your "various other reasons" and upgrade than to try and back-port the 
MSRPC printing support.

Chris -)-----

On Tue, Jun 03, 2003 at 11:08:57AM +0530, Pradeepa Venkatswamy wrote:
> 
> Hi,
>  
> We are using samba 2.2.1a.Due to various other reasons we couldn't able
> to upgrade to higher version of samba.
>  
> Samba 2.2.1a has problem in printer driver uploading,downloading and
> printing.Basically it works fine for one set of printer drivers and
> doesn't work for other set of printer drivers.
>  
> We have analysed the DEBUG log and the ethereal capturing.Samba is not
> failing anywhere and windows is not sending the expected messages in
> case of non-working drivers.
> I am finding it really difficult to analyse this failure.
>  
> Can anyone give detail information on how printer driver
> uploading\downloading works?Especially on spoolss pipe.(I know Microsoft
> doesn't give any specification),but can I get any information from samba
> members??
>  
> Regards,
> V.Pradeepa.
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-- 
"Implementing CIFS - the Common Internet FileSystem" ISBN: 013047116X
Samba Team -- http://www.samba.org/     -)-----   Christopher R. Hertel
jCIFS Team -- http://jcifs.samba.org/   -)-----   ubiqx development, uninq.
ubiqx Team -- http://www.ubiqx.org/     -)-----   crh at ubiqx.mn.org
OnLineBook -- http://ubiqx.org/cifs/    -)-----   crh at ubiqx.org