[Samba] Printing with CUPS. Drivers & Client issues. [Updated]

[Alan Munday]

Success: First of all I've managed to get my network printing working. Thank
you to those who provided support.

In working through the How-to I found that the CUPS/Samba drivers did not
work at all. See below.

However there were no installation issues with the Adobe drivers for 2000/XP
and one minor issue for X86.

The minor issue for X86 (ME in this case) was that during the client driver
install it failed to see the PrinterName.PPD file even though this was
present and access was available. I.e. the client could browse this file via
\\server\print$.

One item in the how-to suggests that the Adobe drivers can be difficult to
obtain. My method was to download the current Adobe Universal Postscript
Windows Driver Installer. On a client I ran the .exe but stopped when it was
ready for user input. If you then go into the windows temp directory (e.g.
C:\windows\temp on ME) there will be two new directories. One with the
install app the other with the Postscript drivers. You can go directly into
these directories and copy the drivers you need. A couple of the x86 drivers
may need renaming to uppercase. The 2000/XP drivers will need renaming and
from the how-to it is obvious which to rename to what. You can then close
the driver install program.

regards

Alan

-----Original Message-----
From: Alan Munday [mailto:alan.munday at brightheadtechnology.com] 
Sent: 09 November 2003 00:09
To: 'Alan Munday'; samba at lists.samba.org
Subject: [Samba] Printing with CUPS. Drivers & Client issues. [Updated]



Trying to follow the Samba CUPS HowTo as closely as possible I chose to
install the CUPS drivers. As in I'm trying to achieve 19.4 Advanced
intelligent printing with postscript Driver Download....


Installing from cups-samba-1.1.19 all went OK other than it reported that it
was actually installing 1.1.17.

As others have reported Clients are not able to install/connect to the
printer which for me was due to Samba clients not having access to the
Drivers file store. Maybe an additional note in the howto?

That fixed and my XP client connects and installs the printer into the local
printers and faxes folder.

However going into the Printers and Faxes folder on either the server or
client and bringing up the properties results in an error:

"The 'printer_name' printer driver is not installed on this computer. Some
printer properties will not be accessible unless you install the printer
driver. Do you want to install the driver now?"

Selecting no gets me to the properties panel and show the printer as a Samba
printer port device.

Asking for a test print, or printing from any applications fails, no jobs
show in the print queue either on the client or on the server.

Checking with rpcclient I'm suspecting that the fact it is expecting a RAW
input is the cause of my problem.

[Windows NT x86]
Printer Driver Info 3:
	Version: [2]
	Driver Name: [OfficeJet]
	Architecture: [Windows NT x86]
	Driver Path: [\\jasper\print$\W32X86\2\cupsdrvr.dll]
	Datafile: [\\jasper\print$\W32X86\2\OfficeJet.ppd]
	Configfile: [\\jasper\print$\W32X86\2\cupsui.dll]
	Helpfile: [\\jasper\print$\W32X86\2\cups.hlp]


	Monitorname: []
	Defaultdatatype: [RAW]


Having said that letting XP load drivers also fails, and the load of the
drivers themselves is not persistent. 

At this point I'm going round in circles trying to check that I have
understood and completed all the items needed from the howto.

I'm not sure if I've missed something out here or have completely
misunderstood the printing architecture.

One other thing is that since rebuilding Samba from the src.rpm I've been
seeing a lot of the following in the logs.

[2003/11/08 22:34:24, 0] lib/util_str.c:safe_strcpy_fn(577)
  ERROR: NULL dest in safe_strcpy

Regards

Alan