samba 2.2 printer queues: some questions...

Paul Sanders sanders_p at univerahealthcare.org
Thu Feb 8 16:58:24 GMT 2001


G'day

I have recently setup a printer server [samba 2.2.alpha1 on RHL6.2] and have
some minor issues.  

First:  Kudos to the samba Team!  Samba in general is a nice package and looks
like it will fit the bill nicely.  Drivers downloads work great!

Second:  How many printers should samba be able to host?  I have 74 queues
running on a PIII 733 with 386 Mb RAM.  My problem is that several queues have
stopped printing.  This is day two of a rollout to 800+ users, of which ~220
have installed one or more of these printers so far.  My initial thought was
that the queue was lagging a bit due to so many people installing and
downloading drivers at once - except that other queues behave fine and the
overall performance of the system is OK.  So far, two of the queues restarted by
themselves after a few minutes and two have refused to restart - all settings in
samba are ok - spooling and printing options enabled, etc. - queue looks OK from
linux but shows as paused in NT.  BTW:  NT4 domain, all NT4wkstn clients, and
all HP4000\4050\4500\5SI printers - no commonality to the ones stopping. Also,
there is no problem with the printers since queues from our exeisting NT print
server can still print to them.   Any thoughts?

Third:  I have a problem with making device setting stick if they are set from
NT - they only stick if I set them from an Win2K box.  Not necesarily a problem
since we don't want users changing default settings anyway and tech support has
win2k machines.  However, when accessing printer properties from a win2k system
the performance is pretty terrible - it can take 2-3 minutes for a window to
refresh or to open\close\apply.  It eventually works - but verrry slooooooowly. 
NT lags a bit as well but not nearly as bad as win2k.  Is it just me or has
someone else seen this?

Fourth:  Does anyone run winbind in a large NT domain?  I am also using winbind
from TNG on the same server.  Winbind works just fine except for the parts that
dont work at all.  I am able to see all domain users and can use them in NT ACLs
on the printers.  I CANNOT see most of the domain groups. however.  We
discovered that running getent group from the command line will produce a seg
fault if the winbind GID range is larger than 58 groups [for example, a range of
1000-1057 will let me getent the first 58 groups - a range of 1000-1058 will
cause a seg fault when getent is run.  My thought is that groups are not
available for this reason [seems logical to me, at least...]. BTW, all users
show up with with no prob.   Anyone else see this problem?

Any feedback will be greatly appreciated.

Paul Sanders
sanders_p at univerahealthcare.org





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