Win 2000 client thrashes network when printing to samba printer

[Chris Kratz]

Hello all,

To start off with, I will admit to being very much a samba newbie.  Having 
said that, I set out on Friday to set up what I thought to be a very simple 
task.  I wanted to share a HP inkjet printer off of an old laptop.

I spent quite a bit of time on it and finally friday evening, I was able to 
get things working (I thought).  Finally, test pages from all the clients 
printed flawlessly.  Printing from the server itself hasn't been a problem at 
all (I was actually amazed at how easy it was to configure).  But, sharing 
the printer to allow windows clients to be able to print has been more of a 
challenge then I expected.

Anyway, from a Windows ME box, printing from applications happens quickly and 
transparently without a hitch.  But, I have another client machine that is a 
Windows 2000 box.  When printing a document from Word (or excel...), the Win 
2000 box absolutely thrashes our network.  The box itself becomes sluggish 
and Word becomes unuseable for 7 to 10 minutes.  After that period of time, 
the document will print.  But as you can imagine, that doesn't go over too 
well with the user of the Win 2000 box.  During that time the utilization of 
our 100Mb network is pegged by the Win2000 box.  

I checked the error logs for samba under /var/log/samba/ and there were no 
error messages generated by the connection (as far as I could tell) nor in 
the system messages.  Under event viewer under 2000, there were two messages 
saying "DCOM was unable to communicate with the computer servername using any 
of the configured protocols".

Test pages print just fine from both ME and 2000.

Without going into a great deal of detail, I am using share level security 
and allow guest printing, browsing, etc as security isn't a big deal right 
now.

I am baffled as to what is happening.  Does anyone have any suggestions?  
Where can I start looking to debug the problem.  For this task, is it just 
simpler to throw Win95 on the laptop and share the printer?  I would do this 
except for the fact that I like being able to remotely manage the box when I 
need to (plus linux has been more stable in my experience...).  Can anyone 
give a two minute explanation why WinME might work, but Win2000 wouldn't when 
printing from Word 2000 and excell 2000?

Thanks for your time,

-Chris

--
Server is Mandrake 8.1 with Samba 2.2.1a

-- 
Chris Kratz
Systems Analyst/Programmer
VistaShare LLC
www.vistashare.com