Got CUPS/Samba printing working. I spent a day frustraited that I couldnt get samba to allow me to associate driver with queues, but, it turned out it was due to this setting-

use client driver = yes

which I’d added in to get past an earlier roadblock I had on the live machine. I hadn’t need the parameter on my test machine, and naturally, it seems to disable clickable driver download.

So here the relevant params…

[global]

        load printers = yes
        printing = cups
        printcap name = cups
        show add printer wizard = yes
        lpq cache time = 100

#shares 

[printers]
        comment = all printers
        path = /var/spool/samba
        browseable = no
        public = yes
        guest ok = yes
        printable = yes
        printer admin = print-admin

[print$]
        comment = Printer Drivers
        path = /var/lock/samba/printing/drivers
        browseable = yes
        guest ok = no
        read only = yes
        write list = print-admin

I’m storing the printer drivers in the same path as the runtime tdbs.

Getting not so far, but learing much about samba/cups printing.

I could get everything to work on our PDC, except for the assignment of Window print drivers to the cups print queues. I couldn’t get to work from the “Add Printer Wizard”. I got a “Printer settings could not be saved. Access is denied.” error. Got the same thing from the command line, using rpcclient. As far as I can tell, there is no way to perform this action directly on the tdb file which hold the data. It must be done though system calls.

My guess is what’s keeping it from working is that the smb.conf file that’s governing this is a second smb process I run independant of the PDC, on a virtual ethernet interface. I wonder if the RPC calls are going back to the main interface, somehow.

Printing

I’m going to try to tackle printing migration. Look like, to get something close to NT style IP printing, which is what we have, we need to do this.

1) Set up CUPS to allow raw printing

2) Set up CUPS to send page log files to syslog

3) add raw print queue to our printer IPs using the CUPS lpadmin utility

4) Set samba to share CUPS print queues

The test queues seem a little slow, but I’m going to go ahead with it. The main difficiently I see is auditing print queue usage through the /var/log/cups/page_log file. It seem a bit un-verbose. I’d like to find away to capture the file names while keeping the printer connection raw.