Use PC printers from IRIX?

[Peter Samuelson]

[Meinrado Samala <samala at wam.umd.edu>]
> My question is whether Samba will also allow UNIX systems to see and
> use Windows files and printers as well.

What you need to do is set up a print queue on the IRIX box which
forwards jobs to the NT box, then share the queue with the other Unix
boxes, same as any other queue.

I don't remember the specifics of IRIX print queues (something funky
with Impressario I guess) but if there's a way to define a pipe
backend, that's what you need to do.  The pipe should lead to a shell
script that invokes 'smbclient' with the necessary arguments.

With an lpd-derived print subsystem, the conventional way to accomplish
this is to define a printer with /dev/null as the print device and the
smbclient-calling script as the input filter ("if=").  Hack, hack.

Note that smbclient does not seem to have a non-interactive
non-command-line method to input a password, so if your print share
requires a password this will of necessity show up in your 'ps' output.
My "solution" here was to create a dedicated print job account on the
NT domain and just use that -- no normal user accounts were harmed in
the making of this movie....

Alternatively, of course, you can bypass Samba entirely and set up an
lpd service on the NT server.  I think this comes with the resource kit
but I'm not sure, it's been awhile.  I don't remember if it works well
or not (but since when did any Berkeley-derived print daemon actually
work *well*? <g>)

Peter