[Samba] APW issue and excessive Get-Printer-Attributes in CUPS access_log

[Jeff Hardy]

Hello all,

I am trying to get to the bottom of a printing issue with
samba-3.0.25b-2.fc7 and cups-1.2.11-2.fc7.  I wasn't sure whether to
start here or the CUPS list.

When left running for an hour or two, the CUPS process will often be
left using nearly 100% CPU.  At this point, printing and add printer
wizard operations from Windows clients over Samba are unreliable.
Dialog boxes pertaining to the latter are of the form:

"Printer settings could not be saved. Operation could not be completed."

However the CUPS error_log shows that my addprinter script, which simply
runs lpadmin, completed immediately.  Also, any changes that were made
to the 'windows-ish" properties of the printer (ie, driver, comments,
etc.) are also done successfully, despite this error message.

I think that Samba seems to never finish its reload and re-stat of all
the printers on the system after the addprinter.  With loglevel set to
3, Samba ends with this message:

[2007/07/18 10:42:28, 3] printing/pcap.c:pcap_cache_reload(117)
  reloading printcap cache

I can restart CUPS and Samba at this point and things are back to
normal.  If I let it sit, printing is mostly reliable, but no addprinter
operations will complete unless I restart both daemons.  A successful
addprinter run is normally:

[2007/07/18 13:12:27, 3] printing/pcap.c:pcap_cache_reload(117)
  reloading printcap cache
[2007/07/18 13:12:33, 3] printing/pcap.c:pcap_cache_reload(223)
  reload status: ok

Now for what I think is related...the CUPS access_log is filled with
entries like this, dozens every second:

localhost - - [18/Jul/2007:11:15:04 -0400] "POST / HTTP/1.1" 200 190
Get-Printer-Attributes client-error-not-found
localhost - - [18/Jul/2007:11:15:04 -0400] "POST / HTTP/1.1" 200 265
Get-Jobs successful-ok
localhost - - [18/Jul/2007:11:15:04 -0400] "POST / HTTP/1.1" 200 186
Get-Printer-Attributes successful-ok
localhost - - [18/Jul/2007:11:15:04 -0400] "POST / HTTP/1.1" 200 190
Get-Printer-Attributes client-error-not-found
localhost - - [18/Jul/2007:11:15:04 -0400] "POST / HTTP/1.1" 200 190
Get-Printer-Attributes client-error-not-found
localhost - - [18/Jul/2007:11:15:04 -0400] "POST / HTTP/1.1" 200 190
Get-Printer-Attributes client-error-not-found

As soon as I turn Samba off on this machine, there is no activity at
all.  That makes sense, as this is primarily an SMB/LPD print server
with all raw queues.  My smb.conf settings for printing are simply:

load printers = yes
printing = cups
printcap name = cups
cups options = raw
show add printer wizard = yes
addprinter command = /usr/local/bin/smbaddprinter.pl
deleteprinter command = /usr/local/bin/smbdelprinter.pl


Whether or not this amount of log activity is related, is this normal?
Also, has anyone else seen anything like this?  Current workaround is
hourly restarts of both daemons in cron.

Thanks very much.

-Jeff


-- 
Jeff Hardy
Systems Analyst
hardyjm at potsdam.edu