[Samba] Printer Issue with Access XP

[Jeff Stahl]

Good afternoon,

We are experiencing a strange problem using Microsoft Access XP on
Windows XP to create a report when the default printer is set to a
network Samba Printer with drivers stored on the print$ share of the
print server.

We are experiencing errors from Access XP running on Windows XP
indicating 'The wizard is unable to create your report' or, when
attempting to use Design View, 'There was a problem retrieving printer
info for this object. The object may have been sent to a printer that
is unavailable.'

The print server is Samba v2.2.5 (with printing patches installed)
running on RedHat Linux 7.3.

We have had no trouble using a printer off of a Win2k server from the
same client, nor have we experienced a problem using Access 2000 on a
Windows 2000 box to print to the Samba printer.

The references we have found from the Samba pages and Microsoft Pages
seem to point to a DEVMODE structure needing to be read by Access to
enter Report Creation mode.

We have already tried setting 'default devmode = yes' on the printer
within smb.conf, but without luck.

Other than this one problem, printing is working rather well for our
environment.

Does anyone else have experience with an error of this nature, or have
suggestions on what we can do to correct it? 

We have found that we can set the default printer on the workstation
to a locally stored printer definition (Generic Text Only) and then
start the Access Report Designer, and print to the Samba printer by
changing the printer at the time of print, but this is a rather long
way around.

Thanks for any help that you might be able to offer.

Jeff Stahl
Network Administrator
Indiana University South Bend
jstahl at iusb.edu