[Samba] Slow printing / print properties with CUPS and Samba sort-of-solved

Jason Balicki kodak at frontierhomemortgage.com
Sun Nov 7 05:45:48 GMT 2004


I've been banging my head against some printing problems
that I've been having for quite a while.  This weekend
I am migrating an old server to new hardware and a new
base OS, but the version of Samba and CUPS remain the
same.  Because of this I moved all the config files
and the contents of /var/cache/samba from the old
server to the new.  (Foreshadowing:  this was a mistake,
but not a big one.)  Since the new server would be a
complete replacement of the old no changes were necessary.

The problems I had been having boil down to this:  If
my users tried to go to the printer properties or tried
to select "file->print" from any print menu it would
take a long time for a response.  "Long time" being
30-40 seconds, sometimes more than a minute.

I should mention that this started when I installed
Windows XP service pack 2 on my network and that
this issue ONLY affects XP boxes with SP 2 installed.

I told my users "I'm installing a new server soon,
that will fix it."  Of course it didn't and that's
why I'm still at work at 11:33PM on a Saturday. :(

I've tried a lot of things to fix this, but what I
did to fix it was to stop samba, remove all the
printing tdb's and restart samba.  Upon further
discovery I found that I could just remove
the tdb for the printer I was having trouble with.

Response time has gone from 30-40 seconds to 1-3
seconds.  This is MUCH more reasonable.

Details:

I have a multitude of printers, but the worst one
was one of my Canon ImageRunner 5000.

I stopped samba:

service smb stop

removed the tdb files:

cd /var/cache/samba
rm ntprinters.tdb ntforms.tdb ntdrivers.tdb
cd printing
rm <printername>.tdb printers.tdb

restarted samba:

service smb start

Samba then recreates the tdb files as it starts.

I am not sure that you need to remove anything
other than <printername>.tdb since I removed
everything, but after I did I was able to
remove other printer tdb files and get response
time back.

I hope this helps someone, and sorry for repeating
a lot of things, but I wanted to make sure that
someone would be able to find this fix if they
were searching with google or some other engine.

And John T:  I'm willing to write this up a little
better if you want to add it to the troubleshooting
section of the HOWTO.  Just let me know.  I
can write much better, I'm just exhausted at the
moment, but I figured if I didn't write up a little
something now that I'd be too lazy to do it later.

Key words:  samba print printing slow windows xp service
pack sp2 sp 2 xpsp2 properties right click right-click

--J(K)



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