[TriLUG] samba printing.. ugh

[John Broome]

On 9/26/05, Brian Henning <brian at strutmasters.com> wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>    I'm trying to get some printing to PDF accomplished via Samba.  The
> intent is for a Windows XP Pro machine to connect to the Samba-shared
> printer on a Fedora 2 server, which will use a script and ps2pdf to
> create a PDF from the print job.  I'm using the following document as a
> reference in setting this up:
> http://www.digitalhermit.com/linux/printing/index.html#SECTION05000000000000000000
>
> I can see the printer share from the Windows machine and map it as a
> printer.  However, once it appears in my Printers & Faxes folder, it
> shows up with "Access denied, unable to connect."  I've done the
> smbpasswd dance and there's a set of samba credentials that exactly
> matches the Windows logon credentials for the XP machine.  Can anyone
> tell me what I'm missing, and what I need to do to get this thing to
> stop saying "access denied"?  The smb.conf section for the printer follows.
>
> [pdflabels]
>     path = /tmp
>     printable = yes
>     writeable = no
>     create mask = 0700
>     guest ok = yes
>     printer name = pdflabels
>     comment = Prints to a PDF file on the server
>     print command = /usr/share/pdfconvert
>     public = yes
>
> This is really maddening and also a pretty high-priority task...  any
> and all help will be greatly appreciated.


Hi brian,

I set this up recently at home, here's the relevent parts of my smb.conf file:

The completed pdf print job gets dumped into /shr/pdfdropbox which can
be accessed by everyone on my LAN

[shr]
   path = /shr
   browseable = yes
   writeable = yes
   guest ok = yes
   force user = nobody

And here's the heavy-lifting part:

; Set up our PDF-creation print service
[pdf]
   path = /tmp
   printable = yes
   guest ok = yes
   print command = /usr/bin/printpdf %s

   ; There is no need to support listing or removing print jobs,
   ; since the server begins to process them as soon as they arrive.
   ; So, we set the lpq (list queued jobs) and lprm (remove jobs in queue)
   ; commands to be empty.
   lpq command =
   lprm command =

And just in case this helps:

[printers]
        comment = All Printers
        path = /var/spool/samba
guest ok = Yes
printable = Yes
browseable = Yes