Problems with Samba shared printers on two WinXP boxes - Mandriva LE2006

[John Van Ostrand]

On Sun, 2006-06-04 at 18:02 -0400, Clive DaSilva wrote:
> Trying that now, using the Z35 drivers but not much difference. I get 
> the feeling that its more of a network problem than a driver problem, 
> because when I pull up the CUPS admin in a browser, it shows the 
> printers attached to the XP box but there is a comment under the printer 
> line saying "tree connect failed" .... will have to keep researching this

The first thing I try to do in cases like this is to determine if the
printer is actually getting the print job. If the printer has an LED
that blinks when it recieves data, I watch it intently when I send a
print job.

The other tactic I try is to disable the printer (paper out, or turned
off) then I print the job and see if it appears in the Windows spooler.

If it is not making it to the Windows PC you may need to:

1. Print using an XP login and account. I usually setup a separate XP
account for this and set the password to not expire. You could also
enable the guest account and set suitable permissions on the Windows
printer, but I don't consider this to be very secure.

2. Apply some of the registry changes (usually found
in /usr/share/doc/samba*/registry).

3. Check firewall settings on the XP systems. It's always a pain when I
realize I was fighting a firewall the whole time.

4. Make sure that the samba server can resolve the PC name or has an IP
address in the printer setup. On larger windows networks one uses WINS
servers (samba with "wins server = yes") or DNS. Make sure that you can
run "nmblookup PCNAME" on Linux. This ensures that samba can find the
PC.

Manually test using smbclient:

smbclient -L PCNAME
smbclient //PCNAME/SHARE_NAME -I ip.add.re.ss -U XPLOGIN

Hope it helps.

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