[Samba] My experiences of the spoolss subsystem

[Martyn Ranyard]

My experiences so far -

   After I upgraded from 2.something to 2.2.2 I added a printer to my Samba 
server (an Epson Stylus COLOR 400) and all went well - I was even able to 
upload the drivers eventually and then all the NT4 clients could see it 
automatically.  I upgraded to 2.2.3a, and still no problems until about a 
week later.  I needed another station to be able to print, which I thought 
would be no trouble, but it failed to work - unfortunately I am writing 
with hindsight and cannot remember the problem completely.  After that, 
noone seemed to be able to print test pages - this appeared to be a 
corruption in the driver which I have not yet been able to work out - the 
thing that leads me to the driver, is that when the user clicks Print Test 
Page, the machine Blue-screens on them!

   What I did to solve this is to remove the printer drivers from their 
location on the server, remove the print$ share and remove the printers 
from the clients.  When I added them again, it asked for the drivers, which 
I placed on a share accessible to all workstations, and it works fine again.

   I write this email not in the hope of a response or with the ability 
unfortunately to reproduce the symptoms as this is a production server and 
as it is working I would have a hard time justifying downtime.  I hope that 
someone can look into this and that this information helps - if not - 
please feel free to throw it out of the window and curse the fact that I 
was on very limited time and couldn't afford to take notes.  Sorry for such 
a depressing email people, but hope it helps.


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Martyn Ranyard