Printing problems with Samba on AIX

[Daniel Sheppard]

We've been running Samba on AIX 4.3.3 and we recently changed to a new
server. Everything appeared to be running fine for a while, but then we
decided to strip away the burst page from our prints by nulling out the
burst page file.... and now the fun begins.

Printing still works fine from a unix level, but attempting to print via
samba appears to do absolutely nothing. The print commands in the smb.conf
file are correct, as they work fine from a command line, but the just don't
appear to be called when trying to print through samba from our win95/98/nt
clients. I tried changing the print command to echo xxx > \tmp\xxx but no
file was created when I attempted a print. Anything that gets printed
appears to just go into a black hole.

At about the same time that we nulled the burst page and the problem began,
we got a coredump from something - I know this is what must've caused the
problem, but as is always the case, I've got no idea which process caused
the thing...

We've got other servers and ran through exactly the same process of setting
up Samba and AIX and then nulling out the burst page, but we can't seem to
reproduce the error - our old server has a virtually identical file system
and config set up and it ran fine for over a year - it's currently running
to handle all the printing that the new server.

Daniel Sheppard
Prometheus Software
daniels at pronto.com.au