Printing breaks network

[jnegron at suffolk.es]

Hello,

I am faced with a problem which is driving me up the wall. I have been
reading doc after doc to no avail, and my users are ready to lynch me.

I have 20 W95  (OSR2)  clients and a linux Mandrake 7.2 server with
SAMBA 2.0.7 forming a workgroup. They all print to two identical
printers, OKI 20 plus postscripts, via CUPS, as a class. All machines
are identical, all hang from the same HP procurve 10/100 hub, all at 100
hdx. They all have intel nics with the speed hard set (no autoconfs).  I
have SAMBA as the master browser and WINS server. All machines have a
hosts with the IPs and names.  IPs are static.

When I print from any machine, the windows network dissapears for about
3-4 minutes. I can't browse the network ( even from the server via
smbclient) or print, even typing  the UNC directly, doing a "find
computer" doesn't work either. After that time span, the windows network
comes back, however, any printing done in the interval sets the client's
printer offline, so windows queues  have to be jostled into activity
again.  Since we do a lot of printing, this means I always have between
2 and 10  users who wish me bodily harm.

By the way, while these dead spans occur, TCP/IP is fine. They can ping,
surf, etc...

TCP/IP is the only protocol on the w95 machines.

Any help will be *greatly* appreciated.

Saludos. Juan.