[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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