random errors when printing

[Stephen L Arnold]

When the world was young, hubert.fauque at wanadoo.fr carved some 
runes like this:  

> all seems to works fine: I can read a linux drive from W98, and
> read a windows drive with smbclient, but when I print a file from
> W98, sometimes it works, sometimes not: I click on the print
> button in a W98 app, I see a file appearing in /tmp (on the
> linux machine) and sometimes the transfer stops and on windows I
> get an error message "printer not available"; I reclick on the
> print button without changing anything and sometimes it works or
> it stops but not at the same place; when there is a *big*
> printing file (e.g. a photo at 1440dpi > 20Mo) it almost always
> stops during the transfer; for a small file (3Mo e.g.) it works
> often; 

You may be running out of spooling space on your /tmp partition; 
what is your partition setup?  Do a 'df' at the shell prompt to see 
how much space is available.  There's an lpr switch that tells it 
to make a symlink to the print file (instead of actually copying 
the entire file to the spool dir); see the man page for lpr.  The 
linux Printing HOWTO is also helpful.  I'm not a printing wizard. 
I'm not sure how the normal spool dir(s) (/var/spool/lp, etc) works 
with samba; I think the samba spool dir is separate.  You may want 
to put your printer share somewhere other than the system /tmp 
directory.

HTH, Steve

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Stephen L. Arnold                        Senior Systems Engineer
ENSCO Inc.                        email:  arnold.steve at ensco.com
P.O. Box 5488                         www:  http://www.ensco.com
Vandenberg AFB, CA  93437                    voice: 805.606.8838
                                               fax: 805.734.4779
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