[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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