[Samba] Enum printers slow in general... -> Re: 6 second delay for File / Print dialog to come up

[Paul Gienger]

Michael Lueck wrote:

> I've been digging further on this...
>
> Turned logging back up to 10. Reboot Win2K client, open notepad, 
> etc... delete all logs, File/Print, and when the dialog finally comes 
> up quick open the log to see what happened. 6128 lines of log just for 
> three network printers!
>
> I have time stamping turned on in the logging, and I only catch about 
> 3 seconds worth of traffic, that does not account for ALL of the 6 to 
> 7 second delay.
>
> I saw some entries that it could not get the workstation to answer up 
> as a server, ja, we turn off the server service on non-servers. Turned 
> it back on, log entries went away, not the delays.
>
> Are these Win2K/XP style (spoolless) printers just that slow in general?
>
> WordPerfect is major painful as it reformats each file you open for 
> the selected printer, and how does it know the printer... it enum's 
> the printers... six seconds here, six seconds there... so much for 
> 3GHz client PC's! ;-)

How is your nameservice set up?  Can the server find the client by the 
netbios name it advertises?  I've seen some really long delays if this 
is screwed up bad enough. When you print the samba server will try to 
contact your client back (for some reason, why does it samba devs?)  and 
if it can't get you it hangs.  You should see logs like 'couldn't 
contact spoolss on [SOMEBOX].

Our specific situation was like this: 
Some client box had a name, we'll call it dynamicPC.  When it was on 
DHCP it put itself into dns as dynamicPC and everything was fine.  The 
user decided he wanted it as a static so it could be a 'server' for some 
test environment, what it was isn't important.  I told him some static 
addresses to use for whetever machines he needed, and I set them up with 
DNS names like static1-5.  When he put his machine in static he didn't 
change the name to staticX, but kept it as dynamicPC.   When he came to 
the server as dynamicPC, he also didn't re-register his dns name, 
because he was static, and he didn't reverse map to dynamicPC.  Soooo, 
the samba server saw him coming as dynamicPC and tried to contact that 
dns name, which was now a black hole.

Your (relatively quick) delay could be because your dns/wins (or lack 
thereof) server is returning NXDOMAIN right away rather than shunting 
you off to a dead IP like mine did.  It's always quicker to get a 
definitive no than sit around waiting for an answer that isn't coming.


-- 
Paul Gienger                     Office:		701-281-1884
Applied Engineering Inc.         Cell:			701-306-6254
Information Systems Consultant   Fax:			701-281-1322
URL: www.ae-solutions.com        mailto:pgienger at ae-solutions.com