Non public printers

Jose Oliver Segura joseo at ac.upc.es
Thu Mar 26 08:06:27 GMT 1998


	Hi all!

	I'm having some troubles trying to identify the users that are
accesing some printers...

	We're runing Samba 1.9.17p2 on HP/UX 10.20 , and the client that gives
us this problems is a Citrix WinFrame box (a modified version of Windows NT
3.5 )
	At first, our "printers" service was a public service, and our guest
account in the Unix side was an account created with the same name as the
netbios name of the server trying to access. With this configuration, all the
print request issued by any user in the client appeared in the server as
issued from the generic user "pcsys" (the netbios name of the client). Given
the fact that WinCenter/WinFrame allows us to autentificate the logins against
a NIS server, we did it (this implies that all the people using this service
is supposed to have a valid account in the Unix side). With this fact in mind,
we have thought to change the "printers" service to make it not public in order
to be able to identify with no possible error the exact user that is printing
each job (for security/accounting reasons)

	At a first look, changing the parameter "guest account = %m" by "guest
account = %U" in the Samba configuration file was a quick (and dirty) solution,
since the client sends the correct NIS username with each printer connection.
But this solution isn't good enough: the "printers" service still being a
public service, so no password is required (this implies that, for example,
any client can issue print jobs as any valid user in the Unix side, without
being it). Given that situation, the solution was, we thought, to deny at all
the public access to the "printers" share, asking for a valid username/password
pair every time a user wants to print a job.

	This idea ("public = no" in the "printers" section of the samba
configuration file) works fine with Windows 95 clients, but doesn't work with
Citrix WinFrame 1.6 and Windows NT 4.0 clients (the client cannont connect to
the share).

	Can anybody help me? Any hints?

	Thanks in advance,
	Oli
-- 
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Jose Oliver Segura (joseo at ac.upc.es)
http://www.ac.upc.es/homes/joseo
Departamento de Arquitectura de Computadores	     OOO
Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya		     OOO
Barcelona - Catalunya - Spain			LCAC OOO UPC
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