[Samba] CUPS printing from Windows

Alan Becker beckera at softrends.com
Tue Feb 17 05:03:19 GMT 2004


I have replaced a WinNT4 PDC with a Samba server.  I'm not experiencing 
problems
with file sharing/locking at all, but printing is another issue.  In 
this network, there are
several dot-matrix printers that are ONLY printed to using a DOS 
application, and
a laser (HP 2300, PCL and PS) that is primarily used for Windows printing. 

Problem:  Windows clients (using downloaded drivers from print$) don't 
seem to
have full or proper control of printing.  Example 1: An excel user has 
to click on
"Print to fit" in Page setup in order for the page to be scaled 
properly.  Otherwise
it prints on multiple pages in very large type.  Example 2: Another 
Excel user
attempts to set Landscape orientation.  The setting is accepted. no 
error is generated,
but the page continues to print in portrait orientation.

To begin with, this unit is based on RedHat 9 with all current updates 
(kernel 2.4.20-28.9, 
Samba 2.2.7a-8.9.0, Cups 1.1.17-13.3.0.3).  After discovering that CUPS 
was the only
printing system that RH9 installed, I went to the documentation and read 
the HOWTO
chapters 18 (Classical printing support) and 19 (CUPS printing support). 
I then did the following:

(1) Create the print queues using the RH/Gnome Printing control applet
(2) Test printing from Linkx (ok)
(3) Obtain the Windows drivers from the NT4 PDC (copied the whole
   c:\winnt\...\w32x86 structure to a scratch area.
(4) Obtain the detailed descriptions of each installed driver using the 
rpcclient utility
   from the Samba server, querying the old NT4 server (temporarily 
attached) with the
   getdriver "queue_name" function.  Route the query results to a file.  
Repeat for all queues.
(5) Write a script to parse the output of (4) and automate steps 4-10 of 
"Manual
   Driver Installation in 15 Steps" from Chapter 19. 
(6) Run the script for each print queue.  Drivers appear to be added 
without problem.
(7) Join a WinNT workstation to the Samba domain
(8) As Administrator, connect to the laser print queue.  Succeeds, no 
error message.
(9) Bring up Excel, attempt to print Landscape as noted above. This fails.

Questions::
(A) The failure to command the printer properly suggests a problem with 
the uploaded
   drivers.  Are there any other common explanations for this type of 
behavior??

(B) I attempted to set the dot-matrix queues to the Generic printer/Raw 
device.  In this
mode, I printed a short text file (in Linux), and copied a test file to 
the network queue
(under Windows).  In either case, the file was printed, but the paper 
was not advanced
to the next page.  In other words, this queue is so raw that it doesn't 
even recognise the
end of a print job, so multiple print jobs can be printed on the same 
page.  Is there any
middle ground, where inter-job pagination occurs, but no other filtering 
is enabled??

TIA for your attention.
A. Becker




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