[Samba] Printers inaccesible

[Alfredo Ramos]

Hello;

  I have a strange situation. 

  About a year ago we upgraded to samba-3.0.10 from samba-2.28a and joined 
the samba server to an AD domain as a member server. The migration went 
smooth. Everything fell in place just right -- until a few weeks ago that 
is.

  A few weeks ago we aquired a new plotter, and while setting it up to be 
used, we encountered the first problem. We were not able to load the 
drivers onto the client workstation. This was fixed by adding the 
parameter "write list = @ads" to the printers share on the conf file. We 
had not experienced this problem before because the samba server was our 
DC and in order to load drivers the user doing it had to specify an 
account with root privileges on the server. Now that we migrated to AD 
samba no longer keeps a password file. All authentication is done by AD. 
So, the "write list" parameter tells samba to treat anybody in that group 
as an administrator.

  The problem we're experiencing now is that, although the driver is 
loaded on the client workstation, it appears that only administrators are 
able to print to the plotter; regular users can not. When a regular user 
tries to print to it, he gets an "Access denied" message. 

  Thinking that the problem was with the plotter somehow, I added more 
regular HP printers, and got the same results.

  To make a long story short. Every printer that was defined before the 
migration works fine. Every printer defined after the migration does not.
I haven't had enough time to go through the changes since release 3.0 
because this is kind of low priority for now. But I definitely will have 
to know what is causing this behavior. I can tell that the problem is 
somewhere in the exchange of credentials between AD and samba because on 
the logs I see samba checking them and failing. If there is a parameter 
that I am not using, I would very much appreciate it if somebody could 
point me in that direction. If this is something that can be fixed by an 
upgrade to a later release, I can live with it until after the semester is 
over.

  This is my printers share:

[printers]
   comment = Owlnet Postscript Printers
   lpq command = /usr/site/LPRng/bin/lpq -P %p
   print command = echo PRINTING %s to %p at ....
   guest ok = no
   path = /var/spool/samba
   use client driver = Yes
   writable = no
   public = yes
   printable = yes
   write list = @ads

  Our server is a Solaris 5.8

I would appreciate any help with this.

Best regards;

Al.

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