[Samba] Procedure for installing Windows drivers on Samba with CUPS

[Adam Nielsen]

Hi all,

This isn't a plea for help, but rather I have just been through the 
procedure for installing Windows drivers on a Samba machine using CUPS, 
and I thought I'd post my notes in case it helps someone one day as the 
documentation doesn't focus too strongly on my particular set up (it 
focuses on using Windows drivers without CUPS, or PostScript drivers 
with CUPS, but there's less about using Windows drivers with CUPS.)

So if you are using CUPS and Samba, and you want to use "point-n-print" 
on your Windows machines with the manufacturer's drivers (in this case 
Ricoh MFDs) here is the process, which has only been tested on Win 7 
64-bit, and assumes you have already set up the print$ share and can 
write to it from the Windows machine you will be using for this procedure.

  1. Create a new CUPS print queue.  IPP works best, but any protocol 
will do (IPP causes usernames and job titles to appear on our machines' 
front panels.)

  2. Select the "Raw" manufacturer, with the "Raw Queue" model and 
continue until the queue is ready.

  3. "killall -HUP smbd" to make it see the new printer, possibly even 
killing your own session ("smbstatus | grep username" then "kill" those 
PIDs.)

  4. Run \\server and on the menu below the normal menu (where it says 
Organize, Search, etc.) choose the last option "View remote printers". 
This view allows remote printers to be examined without trying to 
install them.

  5. If the printer is not visible, in the address bar type in 
\\server\queuename and then cancel anything that comes up, and go back 
and refresh the list of printers.  The missing queue should now be 
visible.  It seems to take a while before it will show up reliably.

  6. Right-click properties on the new printer, and when asked to 
install the '' driver, it is *very* important to say no.

  7. On the Advanced tab click New Driver, then follow the prompts.  If 
the New Driver button is greyed out, you need to give yourself more 
permissions.  Giving permission to an AD group doesn't seem to work, you 
seem to have to grant your own (Windows) user print management 
permissions with the 'net' command (on the Linux box.)  This worked for me:

   $ net -U server\\root rpc rights grant 'DOMAIN\username' 
SePrintOperatorPrivilege

8. In the New Driver window, click Have Disk and find the driver you 
want to install.

9. If you get an error about needing x64 drivers, edit the driver's .inf 
file in the driver and replace all instances of "NT.5.1" (or higher) 
with "NT.5.0".  If this doesn't work, duplicating the 64-bit stuff and 
putting it in a header for 32-bit works too (but this is only advisable 
if you don't have any 32-bit Windows machines.)

10. Click OK to close the printer properties and don't worry if you get 
a weird error.

11. Click properties again and you should see the full printer 
properties with the new driver.

12. On the Sharing tab click "Additional Drivers" and install the x64 
drivers (it seems to install only 32-bit ones.)  If you are prompted for 
where to install them from select the same driver again.

13. On the Advanced tab make sure you click Printing Defaults and change 
something and apply the changes so the default settings aren't null (you 
can change it back, but usually you have to change it to A4 or set 
paper-to-tray assignments anyway.)

14. On the General tab make sure the queue name matches the CUPS queue 
name.  Some drivers change this from something like "my-queue" to "Bob's 
Fantastic Printer Company PCL 6", but you won't be able to install the 
printer on client machines if the names don't match.

15. You should be able to double-click on the printers from client 
machines normally and have the driver install automatically now.  If you 
get prompted for admin access and you're connected to a domain, add your 
Samba server in to the approppriate group policy so drivers can be 
installed from it with no elevation required.  Plenty of pages on Google 
explaining this.

16. If you get an error installing the printer (something about being 
unable to install the driver), wait for a few hours as this often helps. 
  Maybe restarting Samba would help too, but for us it was a production 
machine so that wasn't possible.

I have successfully used this procedure to install four Ricoh MFDs and 
their fax driver, so I hope this guide comes in handy for someone else 
one day!

Cheers,
Adam.