[Samba] pcap cache not loaded

[Lambertz, Björn]

Hi all,

 

I stumbled upon an error, that doesn’t yield many helpful search results, so
I just want to place some information here, so it can be found and may help
others.

 

My samba log had following errors:

 

Failed to fetch record!

pcap cache not loaded

 

 

Most suggestions are: If you don’t want to provide printers, just set `load
printers = no` in your smb.conf. If you want to provide printers, this maybe
a solution for you:

 

pcap means printcap, which is a file created by cups. Man smb.conf states:

To use the CUPS printing interface set printcap name = cups. This should be
supplemented by an additional setting printing = cups in the [global]
section.  printcap name = cups will use the "dummy" printcap created by
CUPS, as specified in your CUPS configuration file

 

My cups configuration file said (cups-files.conf):

# Location of the file listing all of the local printers...

#Printcap /run/cups/printcap

 

Unfortunately, setting `printcap name = cups` didn’t resolve the errors in
samba log. The file /run/cups/printcap was present, but obviously samba
couldn’t find or read it. So I set it like this in my smb.conf `printcap
name = /run/cups/printcap`

 

This worked, but after reboot, printcap was not yet written by cups (when
samba was started), so samba rightly complains it cannot read the file. So i
had to set a printcap cache time. In my case I chose 60 seconds, which makes
samba look for an updated printcap file every 60 seconds. Default is 750
seconds.

 

So I ended up resolving the errors in samba log with these entries in
smb.conf:

 

load printers = yes

printing = cups

printcap name = /run/cups/printcap

printcap cache time = 60

 

Best regards, Björn