[Samba] Can't connect to printers from Win 2008 and Win 7

[Åke Holmlund]

Thank You for making that clear!

New problem. I have been trying to set up a temporary Samba server
to handle printing until this problem gets fixed. I am running
3.3.10 on a Sun Solaris 10 machine. From a Win 2003 (32 bit) server
I can install print drivers and print ok but from Win 2008 R2 and
Win 7 it´s not working.

In Win 2008 R2, if I try to connect to a printer with no drivers
installed on the server I get a dialog box stating that there
are no drivers installed on the server. This is as expected.

However, if I go to properties there is NO dialog about missing
drivers. Clicking on the Advanced tab and then "New Driver" starts
the "Add Printer" wizard but when I get to the "Printer Driver
Selection" there are no drivers to choose from. All I can see is
the text "(Unable to find any drivers for this device)"

If I try to connect to a printer that has a driver installed,
I get error 0x000006d1

Any ideas?

Åke Holmlund

--On 29 januari 2010 10.09.57 -0800 Jeremy Allison <jra at samba.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 05:46:14PM +0100, Åke Holmlund wrote:
>> Hello!
>>
>> I have sent this a few days ago but I don't think it made it to the
>> mailinglist.
>>
>> We have problems connecting to printers (spoolss) from Windows Server
>> 2008 (64-bit, domain member) and Windows 7 (64-bit, NOT domain member).
>> When trying to connect to the printers we get an error message saying
>> "Windows cannot connect to the printer. Operation could not be completed
>> (error 0x0000000d)". Connecting as a "standard" user or a domain
>> administrator makes no difference.
>>
>> If I try to add a printer on the server from Windows 2008, there are no
>> ports to choose from in the "Choose a printer port" dialog.
>>
>> Connecting to the printers is no problem from Win XP, Win Vista and Win
>> 2003 (all 32-bit). When trying to add a printer from Windows 2003, the
>> "Samba Printer Port" shows up in the "Choose a printer port" dialog.
>>
>> The Samba (domain) server is 3.4.4 running on Solaris 10 (Sparc).
>>
>> Any ideas what the problem can be or where to start looking?
>
> Ok, here's the deal. If you have 64-bit Windows clients at the
> moment you need to be using 3.3.10, not anything later. If you're
> using 32-bit Windows clients, you can use 3.4.5 or later.
>
> The reason (and Guenther can correct me if I'm wrong), is
> that in 3.4.x we changed from the hand-marshalled SPOOLSS RPC
> we used in 3.3.x, which was mostly correct after being worked
> on for many years, to pidl-generated SPOOLSS RPC directly from
> the idl files. Now our idl files are correct, but it turns
> out that the Windows idl parser for SPOOLSS is itself custom,
> and won't accept the normally marshalled RPC packets that
> the pidl-generated code creates.
>
> Guenter and Metze have been doing a lot of work on fixing
> this, and this is why 32-bit Windows clients work in 3.4.5.
> However there are still some changes needed for 64-bit Windows
> clients, and this will probably make it into an early patch
> for 3.5.x (it won't make 3.5.0, as it's too late to test the
> changes needed before we ship next month).
>
> I'm going to write this up as a tech-note for the next
> 3.4.x release and for 3.5.0 and get it into the release
> notes. Hope this hasn't caused you too many problems.
>
> Jeremy.