[Samba] domain printer issues

Brian May brian at vpac.org
Sun Nov 29 15:14:43 MST 2009


Daniel Sheridan wrote:
> FWIW, I have the same problem here with Samba 3.4.2 and Windows XP
> clients. In fact, one printer driver works via point'n'print, but the
> others do not, so for now I've set all printers to use that one driver
> (the PPDs are similar enough that it's not a problem).

Ok, so maybe it was the upgrade from 3.2.5 to 3.4.2 (required for
Windows 7) that broke things. The first few days seemed fine, so I
thought it was OK, but maybe that is because nobody reported problems...


> I did find that uploading a printer driver to the server from Windows
> worked okay with point'n'print (well, except that the driver itself was
> flakey), so perhaps something wrong with Smaba's setdriver RPC call?

Yes, I have observed uploading the printer driver works fine. There are
two symptoms I have observed:

(a) If I disconnect any printer and try to connect again, sometimes, on
some computers, it won't connect again. Instead I get the error:

The server of the 'HP LaserJet 4100 PCL 5e' printer does not have the
correct printer driver installed. If you want to search for the proper
driver, click OK. Otherwise click Cancel and contact your network
administrator or original equipment manufacturer for the correct printer
driver.

(b) for the occasional printer where (a) is not a problem, if I print a
test page, I get:

Test page failed to print. Would you like to view the troubleshooter for
assistance? Operation could not be completed.


What I find curious is if I manually setup the printer, and tell it to
connect directly to the printer via TCP/IP port, Windows will ask me if
I want to use the existing driver. If I say Yes, it will setup a printer
that works just fine using the already installed printer drivers that
were installed when I tried to connect from the Samba share. Previously
I thought it was a driver issue, now I doubt it.


Anyway, it occurred to me that we now have a Windows 2008 server on the
domain, so I think for now I will transfer the printers over to this
server and see if that works any better. I don't particularly want to
setup 6+ printers manually on 10+ computers (Yes, we have way to many
printers at our work place).


Brian May



More information about the samba mailing list