[Samba] 2.2.6 and printer questions

Gerald (Jerry) Carter jerry at samba.org
Sun Nov 3 14:45:01 GMT 2002


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On Fri, 1 Nov 2002, Thomas Bork wrote:

> >> If printers served from Samba it is nessesary to double click the
> >> netbios name of the samba server to see printershares. Why?
> >
> > Unknown.  Tim had looked into this but I don't remember the details.
> 
> 
> I'm also thinking to remember (may be this is very bad english ;o) the
> question on this list and someone, who wants to look into it for 2.2.6.
> But the behavior is the same as in 2.2.5.

That probably would have been me.  I think it just fell off the plate as a 
non-essential feature for 2.2.6.  We should make sure this works in 3.0.

> Is it possible, to bundle/deliver printer drivers in an tarfile, whith
> their relationships to predefined shares?

Theoretically yes.  But Probably not really a good idead since it would 
involve messing with the tdb files directory.  The other problem is that 
printer information can only be initialized (Device Mode & Printer data)
by running the driver bound to the printer.  Really messy.  Then there is 
the EULA as well.

If you could get around the EULA, then you could package preinitialized 
drivers and write the information to smbd's tdbs.  We have support for 
storing driver initialization data already.

> I'm the maintainer of a Samba package for the GPL project eisfair
> (www.eisfair.org), an easy to use internet server. In my package,
> currently based on Samba 2.2.6, it is possible to print to an virtual
> printer for creating PDF files and to a virtual printer for the fax
> package (installed ghostscript package is needed) . On the windows
> clients a postscript printer driver must be installed for each of this
> virtual printers.

Sounds interesting.  Hmmm....wish I could read German :-)

> It will be nice, if the driver installation is so easy as possible for
> the user. Thats why I'm interested in an automatic driver installation
> based on the print$ share. But I can see any problems with this:
> 
> If I want to deliver drivers for nt/w2k/xp and win9x/me in the package,
> I think I have to include in the package not only the complete directory
> predefined in [print$] with the drivers. I think I have also to deliver
> the tdb-files
> 
> ntdrivers.tdb
> ntforms.tdb
> ntprinters.tdb
> printing.tdb
> 
> because anywhere here the relationship between printershare and driver
> (format and so on...) is saved. But how can this be done without
> breaking existing relationships with existing drivers and printers in
> the existing configuration on user side?

You don't need printing.tdb.  That's a volatile tdb used to cache jobs 
listed in the queue.  The rest of your assessment is correct.








cheers, jerry
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