[Samba] samba upgrades deletes printer driver pointers / 3.0.24 to 3.0.28 upgrade, lost printers

[Dale Schroeder]

Michael / Dave,

Since the two of you are having similar problems, I thought I would 
respond to both at the same time.  I cannot tell from your messages if 
your Samba/CUPS setup is similar to mine or not.

I started experiencing this problem on Debian lenny systems at either 
3.0.26a or 3.0.27.  It has continued to 3.0.28.  In my case, it only 
affected systems in which I had compiled CUPS from the sources at 
cups.org.  On the systems where both packages came from Debian, I have 
experienced no problems.  On the affected systems, no amount of 
restarting samba and CUPS would fix the problem.  To bring them back I 
had to reboot the system; and in some cases, there was a lag time after 
the reboot before the printers reappeared.  I do not have an 
explanation; maybe someone else can offer one.

Dale

Michael Heydon wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I recently upgraded from 3.0.24 to 3.0.28 on my Slackware 11.0 PDC. I 
> have just noticed several printers have disappeared (they still exist 
> and work in cups but they do not show up in the share listing on the 
> server and users who have them set up cannot print).
>
> Most of the printers are still present, the ones the disappeared have 
> names that are 17 or more characters, the remaining printers all have 
> names of 15 characters or less. All of the clients are XP Pro SP2.
>
> I found an old mailing list message (2003) mentioning a 13 character 
> limit when listing shares, however I don't believe this is the cause 
> as some of the remaining printers have names > 13 characters.
>
> The name length is the only obvious thing that the missing printers 
> have in common. Is there a known difference between .24 and .28 share 
> name/printer name handling? and if so is there a simple way to change 
> it back?


Dave wrote:
> Hello,
>    I'm running a samba and cups combo on a Centos 5.1 machine. It's 
> acting as a lan print server. I used pointprint to upload drivers to 
> the samba share so that windows clients could obtain them. This was 
> working fine until i'm assuming the upgrade 5.0 to 5.1 on centos, when 
> samba was upgraded. The driver paths are still there, drivers, shares, 
> but the .tdb files are not. When i try to connect to the printer and 
> download drivers i'm told that the samba server does not contain the 
> needed drivers. Short of a reinstall is there a way to recover?
> Thanks.
> Dave.
>