[Samba] Samba and Cups interaction

[David Schlenk]

On Jan 5, 2005, at 1:32 PM, Misty Stanley-Jones wrote:

> While trying to solve my printer problem, I have come up with another 
> question
> that Google is not helping me with.  What happens to a print job after 
> Samba
> submits it to Cups?  Is it 'finished' even though Cups is still 
> printing it?
> Is that why my users aren't seeing their print jobs, because Cups has 
> already
> snatched them and Samba assumes they are done?  I would much rather if 
> the
> user could see the print job through its whole life, and could cancel 
> it if
> they wanted to (if it was 1000 pages long and they realized that 
> someone had
> put stationery in the printer for instance)?  This level of things is 
> not
> covered in the docs to the best that I can find.  :(

Even beyond the "was cups support compiled in" question, it is possible 
to not see jobs for their entire life in the samba queue:

If the cups server you are using in conjunction with samba sends jobs 
directly to the printer, then the job should remain in the samba queue 
for the life of the job.

If however you have separate cups server(s) that actually send jobs to 
printers and a local copy of cups on the samba box that just sends the 
jobs to the other cups server(s), then the job will only remain in the 
samba queue for the (short) amount of time it takes your local cups 
server to send the job to other cups servers, since all samba knows .  
[This setup allows you to have redundant/load balancing cups servers.]

I believe you can specify a non-local cups server in the 3.x series of 
samba, but I don't remember the corresponding smb.conf parameters 
off-hand. [And doing this would make redundant/load balancing not work, 
unless you wanted to go round-robin DNS style, but that isn't quite the 
same thing.]

--
David Schlenk
Operating Systems Analyst
Bethel University
Saint Paul, Minnesota
david-schlenk at bethel.edu