Serving NT4 print drivers from Samba

[Gerald Carter]

On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, T. William Schmidt wrote:

> >Don't use the 'printer driver' parameter in smb.conf.
> >It is deprecated.
>
> ...this seems counterintuitive, to deprecate the printer driver
> property.  How else will the Add Printer Wizard (APW) on the client PC
> know which driver to (automatically) grab?  Let me restate the
> scenario with a little more detail.

[giggles a little bit]

I see exactly where you are confused. :-)

I don't mean to sound rude, but did you read the Printing chapter
yet?  You seem to misunderstand how the point-and-print support
works in Samba.  You tell Samba which driver to use by installing the
driver for a printer using the printer properties page "New Driver..."
button as root or a "printer admin".

What you are doing with the 'printer driver' parameter is trying to
dtell Saamba which driver to server, but never installing it.
There is much more to a driver than simply copying files.

> property.  We will instruct each author to define with the APW the printer
> EngrSDPS so that his PC has the driver we wish to use to generate the
> Postscript intermediate files.

Right click on the printer and choose "install" is all the user needs
to do.  The local APW does the same thing.

> The next objective was to make the Samba server behave the same way,
> but instead of selecting it from a browse list, I am doing
> \\netbiosName\EngrSDPS expecting the APW to grab the driver associated
> with the printer driver = property, but that part fails.  I can then
> manually from the NT4 client APW browse the print$ share on the Samba
> server and select the driver, which does download.

Samba 2.2 does behave like an NT printer server.  Trust me on
this one. :-)

> If the latest version of Samba does not behave the way I have
> described, then I intend to examine the Samba source and see if I can
> patch it so that it does.  My problem is managing my expectations and
> the expectations of others that I set.  I expect a Samba print server
> to behave exactly the way an NT4 print server does, and when it does
> not, I am not sure if it is my inadequate implementation of smb.conf
> or that Samba lacks the exact NT4 functionality I am describing.

It does.  And trust me, messing with the spoolss code is not that
intuitive. :-)  But feel free to browse around and send patches.

> Thanks again for your help.  I hope I have explained the problem
> better this time so that you can tell me whether any Samba
> implementation can do it the way we desire.

In your case, I would recommend doewnloading the latest code and
reading the Printing chapter very carefully.  If you have specific
questions that are not answered in that chapter, let me know and
I'll help as much as time permits.












cheers, jerry
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