a question about samba printer entries

[Stephen L Arnold]

When the world was young, Daryl Williams 
<daryl.williams at sharewave.com> carved some runes like this:  

>   i have never done this before and would appreciate some help
>   if possible. i am trying to setup a linux (redhat) machine as a
>   print server. now my question may seem pretty stupid, but
>   the printers are showing up alongside of the filesystem
>   shares and _not_  in the "printers" folder that also appears
>   alongside the filesystem shares. so, the question is, where are
>   the printers icons supposed to appear in the browse list
>   window of the server?

>From what I can see, printers (whether they hang off a windoze box, 
a linux/samba box, or are directly on the network) don't show up in 
the printers folder until the driver(s) is(are) installed on the 
client machine.  At least this true for all the devices (printers, 
fax, etc) that show up in the printers folder on my win95 box.  The 
main printers hang on a dedicated win95 print server (don't ask; it 
wasn't my decision), with a couple others shared out from different 
win95 machines.  My linux/samba box does not have any printers on 
it, but RedHat has a nice SMB printer setup (to send print jobs to 
remote SMB printers).  Samba "sees" these SMB printers and actually 
re-exports them as samba shared printers, however, the samba 
exports don't show in the printers folder until you install the 
drivers (or setup a printer device using an existing driver).  The 
neat thing is, if I take one of those re-exported smb printers and 
run the windoze Install Printer wizard, I can assign a driver (the 
HP drivers are already installed) and port, and send print jobs 
through samba to the win95 print server (and it actually works).  
Not that I really need to do that, I was just curious to see if I 
could.  I've tried to convince the PC/LAN guy to make the print 
server a linux/samba box, but he's afraid...

Hope this helps, Steve

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Stephen L Arnold                      http://www.rain.org/~sarnold
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