[ale] Samba shared printer mystery
Michael B. Trausch
mike at trausch.us
Tue Mar 30 19:01:03 EDT 2010
On 03/30/2010 06:22 PM, Jim Kinney wrote:
> That sounds familiar. Thanks!
No problem.
I've found that Samba is a pain to get setup to work properly on a
network that has systems newer than Windows XP on it. :-| Though
printing seems to be a *royal* pain.
I recently was setting up a network that needed central file sharing and
printing and so forth, and what I really wanted was a setup where the
Samba server had the "printer drivers" installed, and then Windows would
just use a generic driver where the users could tell Samba to print the
job however they wanted (simplex, duplex, stapled, hole-punched,
whatever) and then Samba would be able to tell CUPS to do these things
(and if the printer in question didn't support those services, it could
either ignore them or reject the print job). Alas, that turned out to
be apparently infeasible (at least, in the time frame that I had and
without the ability to do testing ahead of time) and so I wound up going
around and installing printer drivers on all the systems. Grr.
It could also be that I am not exactly an expert when it comes to
Windows itself, much less using SMB to get things rolling efficiently,
so I could have easily missed something that would be obvious to a
(competent) Windows system/network administrator. Though that, I
suppose, would be a tall order: of the many Windows admins I've known, I
can count on a single hand the ones that I could have technical
conversations with and that knew what (I consider to be) basic concepts
were and so forth. Maybe that's why Windows isn't running 90% of the
Internet's core infrastructure. :-)
--- Mike
--
Michael B. Trausch ☎ (404) 492-6475
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