[ale] Samba shared printer mystery

[Michael B. Trausch]

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