Samba printing to a PC client from Solaris

John B. Cole colex017 at tc.umn.edu
Sat Nov 14 02:44:43 GMT 1998


My apologies to any of you who waded through this posting on 
Usenet.  I have tried to avoid cross-posting to the point of idiocy.  :-)

I am running SAS 6.12 on a Sun server under the current version of
Solaris and Samba 1.9.18p10.  I would like to set up printing such that I
can use Samba to pass print jobs from SAS to a user's local (PC)
printer.  From my newsgroup searches, the basic setup appears to be a
common question, but I have not seen any particularly revealing
responses (perhaps due to my inexperience in this area).  I would like
to define several printers (say 10 - 15) so that a given user can use
a configuration line in the SAS printer setup such as:

	/<path>/lp -d<Samba name for local printer>

to print locally from the server.  I.e.:

	John might use "/.../lp -dJohn" in his SAS printer definition,
	and Matt might use "/.../lp -dMatt" in his.

The question I have is this: what is the outline of steps needed to
define the proper configuration?  Here is what I have managed to piece
together so far, and it may be seriously flawed as I am new to Unix
system administration:

(1) define printers in printcaps file (I am using a file named
/etc/samba.print which is explicitly loaded in smb.conf) and set
/usr/local/samba/smbprint as the input filter for those printers;

(2) write the smbprint filter (I think this is where my big problem
is...);

(3) define printers in smb.conf, including allowed users and spool
directories;

(4) enable and accept the printers, which (I think) places the
appropriate info in the /etc/printers.conf file and starts the queues;

(5) create the appropriate spool directories and .conf files for each
printer - also chown the files and folders to root and chgrp them to
lp;

(6) stop and restart smbd and lpd to reinitialize everything.

I have started out trying to set up a single printer in my workgroup,
and am having problems.  I can use smbclient to connect to the
printer, and then the print command to send a job, but I cannot get my
scripts to work.  I have checked the parms in smb.conf and in my
printcaps file, and the Samba tools tell me they are parameterized
correctly.  (I would attach my smbprint file, but I have been through
about four of them today.)  One of the problems I have is that I am
trying to modify examples from the web and this (and other) newsgroups
that use accounting, which I do not want to worry about right now (I
would be happy if I could just get a few printers working).

If someone has the time to (1) let me know if my outline above is in
the ballpark, or if it is too complicated; and (2) provide an example
of printcaps and/or smbprint files from working (non-accounting)
installations, I would be very grateful.

Thanks very much in advance.
_________________________________________________________
John B. Cole				cole017 at tc.umm.edu
Animal Breeding and Genetics
Department of Animal Science
University of Minnesota
St. Paul, 55108


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