Setting up Samba as a Print Server

From SambaWiki
Revision as of 23:04, 22 September 2010 by Fraz (talk | contribs) (→‎Overview)
The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.

Overview

Samba could no only act in the fileserver role. There is also the possibility to do the job as printserver for the windows clients.

This seems to be well known, and nobody needs to any instruction because it is working :-)

When we take a closer lool to this role, it consists out of the following parts:

  • printer share -> at the printingprocess the client copies the spoolfiles
  • printserver software -> cups, lprng, lpr or something else. He delivers the spoolfiles to the printing devices. Maybe over the network or localy
  • windows printer driver -> to use the 'point and print' functionality it makes sence to store the windows printer driver in a special share (print$) on the server. Inside of this driver also the default settings of the printer are stored.
  • printer formular -> Every windows printout depends on the formular with his papersizes and so on. If a formular isn't know to the printserver the client could not use this although the printer was able to do it. Think about large formular or special paper like photos.
  • something I have forgotten ...

Using printers connected to the Samba server

In most of the cases you want to use printers which are directly connected to the samba server. A printer can be connected via various hardware devices (i.e. parallel port, usb, scsi and so forth). But thats not all, you have to take care about the fact that two users can request a print job at the same time. To serve this, you need a software which controls the printer.

CUPS

CUPS is currently the most widely used spool system in Unix environments. Samba has built in support and defaults to CUPS if the develepment package (aka header files and libraries) could be found at compile time. The home of CUPS is [[1]]. Basically all sorts of files can be printed with CUPS, but using a Postscript printer driver will give you the most benefit and the client can control the settings for the printers. A multi-purpose printer driver for Windows can be found at the Adobe site, see [[2]]. The very big advantage of using Postscript as the printing language is that it doesn't matter whether your job has to be printed on a cheap inkjet or a big laser.

LPD

This is the first widely used printing system. It is very simple and doesnt use Postscript. But it is binary clean, so you can print to it directly via client side installed printer drivers.

Providing Printer Drivers to Windows clients with the [print$] share

Uploading a printer driver

Directory structure in drivers directory

The normal directory structure for your printer drivers looks like

drwxr-xr-x   2 root root  96 Feb 24 20:02 COLOR
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root  48 Feb 24 20:02 IA64
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root  48 Feb 24 20:02 W32ALPHA
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root  48 Feb 24 20:02 W32MIPS
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root  48 Feb 24 20:02 W32PPC
drwxr-xr-x   3 root root  72 Feb 24 20:02 W32X86
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root  48 Feb 24 20:02 WIN40
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root  48 Feb 24 20:02 x64

You have to create it yourself. Here is a command line which does it. You only have to change the value of BASEDIR:

BASEDIR=/var/lib/samba/drivers;
for X in COLOR IA64 W32ALPHA W32MIPS W32PPC W32X86 WIN40 x64; do 
  mkdir -p $BASEDIR/$X;
done

how to configure printer admin

since samba 3.0.20 the parameter is depricated and in the actuall version it isn't working anymore.

so what is the commandline to get a printer admin?

do the following command and the user or group will be printer admin:

 net rpc rights grant "<domain|hostname\<user|group>" SePrintOperatorPrivilege -U <hostname>/root

example:

 net rpc rights grant "cake\support" SePrintOperatorPrivilege -U cake/root

this mean the user support on machine is printeradmin by the user root on the hostname "cake"

Special settings on printer and faxes

Enabling new papersizes

Only standardsizes of formulars are known. You have to add the neccessary sizes by hand.

  1. connect to the server \\<SambaServer>>
  2. printer -> Server Propertes -> Forms
  3. Create new form
File:SambaFormA0.png
A0 With 84,10 cm Height 118,90 cm
File:SambaFormA1.png
A1 With 59,40 cm cm Height 84,10 cm
  1. After this steps the large papersizes a shown in the different dialogs

The Size of the formulars depends on the ppds

Using printers connected to another Samba or Windows server

Using a printer connected to another Samba server

It is most likely that the other server is running CUPS to. So you only have to forward the print jobs to the other CUPS service. This is a simple to do in CUPS.

Using a printer connected to a Windows server

You also can use CUPS for it. CUPS has the special backend smb://<server>/<printer>. This in turn calls the smbspool program which is part of the samba suite. So if you set up a printer connected to a Windows server, you set up a normal printer with a special PrinterURI.

Note: the full form of that URI is: smb://[<username>[:<password>]@][domain/]<server>/<printer>


--rcsu 15:34, 15 April 2006 (CDT)