Your message Re: Samba and printer comments (July 5 1999)

[Carey Sinclair]

Yes unfortunately I do not have much luck recieving help from the SAMBA
mailing list.

After much playing I found something weird that was seemingly causing
incorrect comments. Most printers would recieve the comment - "no
entries" which originally I assumed to be the default comment given by
Win95 when it could not get a proper comment. However I later found
that this is not the case. In fact when looking at the printer queue on
the unix side (lpq) I found that the status comment was 'no entries'.
The biggest clue to this was when I installed a particular printer it
recieved the comment 'out of paper'!

So it seems that the comment given to a printer in Win95 is 'sort of'
derived from the printer status outputted from 'lpq'. Currently we use
LPRng and in most cases spool to a Novell server sharing printers via
NFS. The output of 'lpq' for printers that spool to the Novell server
is quite different from printers that we spool to directory (via
Jetdirect).

Output of lpq for a printer that spools to a Novell queue:
---
[root at vulcan HP2500]# lpq -Pbaboon
Printer: baboon is MRDS_HP4MV at mr.tait.co.nz
no entries
--

Output of lpq for a printer that it spooled to directly (Jetdirect):
--
[root at vulcan HP2500]# lpq -Ptest
Printer: test at vulcan  'VULCAN test'
 Queue: no printable jobs in queue
 Status: server finished at 15:03:51
--

In the above examples, the printer comment would be set to 'no entries'
for the top one ('baboon'), but would be set as defined in smb.conf for
the second one ('test').

I wonder if this is how it is supposed to work or if it is just a plain
old bug?

Eventually we intend to spool directly to JetDirect from LPRng rather
than spool to the Novell queues so that will fix our problem.

I hope this gives you a clue to what might be wrong in your case.

I have forwarded this message also to the the samba mailing list.

-=-
 Carey Sinclair
 IT Project Engineer
 Tait Electronics Ltd, Christchurch, New Zealand
 Email: carey.sinclair at tait.co.nz     Ph: +64 3 3583399 Ext. 8145




Ian Cameron wrote:

> I found your message in the Samba list archives, and wondered if you had
> discovered a solution to the problem of incorrect printer comments in Windows
> 95 clients?  I have enabled 3 printers via load printers = true, and all print
> correctly, but only one seems to have the correct comment on the clients.
>
> I could not seem to find any replies to your query on the list, and wondered
> if you had either worked something out yourself, or got any replies personally.