Topic: 6 final & e-smith-cups raw prnter problem

[Nigel]

I'm not getting any output from my raw laser printer on ltp1. I have a USB epson inkjet that's working fine but even though laser print jobs seem to be sent from W2K clients ok there is no evidence of them or and errors on the server. I've been through all the troubleshooting on a client machine and checked that there's not a fault with the printer. I've had a look at not using the raw driver but the linux drivers for the Samsung ML4500 seem  to require a patched version of ghostscript. I have had raw printing to this printer working in the past. Any clues as to where to look for the problem would be great.

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[Robert]

1. Have you changed the LogLevel from "info" to "debug" in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf? If you haven't please do and restart cupsd.
2. According to linuxprinting.org your printer should work with the "gdi" ghostscript driver. Assuming you use the ghostscript package provided with the cups contrib, this device is already compiled into gs. You can generate a foomatic ppd for this driver on the linuxprinting.org site and install it following the instructions in the relevant howto provided with the cups contrib.

[nigel]

thanks.

I've now setup the gdi driver as suggested and it prints the test page fine from the cups admin pages on the server. It looks like something may be screwed up on my w2k client. Looks like a good time for a client OS reinstall but that may have to wait a day or two...

[Robert]

You may know this already, but printing through the Windows driver for your printer to a queue that has a filter attached to it is meant not to work. For this purpose you'll need to explicitly make a raw queue on your cups server. You can print to queues with a filter (such as your foomatic-rip/ghostscript/gdi queue) through a PostScript driver.
Before you reinstall your client, could you try getting more info from cupsd or smbd (assuming you print through smb and not ipp)?

[Robert]

P.S. Feel free to mail me the relevant log snippets. My email address is in the e-smith-cups docu.

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[nigel]

I'm suspicious of my client setup so I'll do some more investigation there. I've got other client machines I can try too. I'll let you know how I get on.

[ryan]

I am not sure I understand the problem in this discussion, but I have found a solution for allowing trouble free printing from windows 2k & XP clients to SME server.  See my previous posting:

http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=9243.msg35159#msg35159

Please post your results if good or bad.

ryan

[Robert]

Please note that Ryan's workaround to use LPR printing instead of samba printing does not work with CUPS & e-smith-cups in the default configuration. It can be made to work and there's a db key to enable it, but I would advise against it because you'd be adding an unnecessary service. If you're looking for an alternative to samba printing with CUPS, use IPP (Internet Printing Protocol). Set the printer port on your windows client to http://servername:631/printers/printername. But please try to get more info about the samba failures first.

[Nigel]

Hi again. I'm still investigating but the problem seems to be at the windows end. My w2k client has got in a bit of a mess with several profiles for the same user so I think I need to sort this out first. I did have a go on a clean XP client but again the print job doesn't seem to get  beyond the print queue on the client machine. I been reading lots of cups and samba doc's but as yet I've not got a handle on what's going wrong.

I'll post more here if I make any progress.

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[ryan]

You might try the LPR solution if you can remove CUPs or use a fresh install of SME.  I have used LPR printing with SME since Windows 2k was new.  It is reliable and users don't need to be logged in with an SME user account to use the printer.  

What is the benefit if having CUPS on an SME server?  The only obvious feature I see is an Internet Printing server, but this would require changes to iptables....I would be interested to know how CUPS benefits the SME server.

ryan

[Robert]

The benefit for me is obvious: with the standard SME printing setup I can't print, with CUPS I can. I print from Mac OS 9 and from the SME Server itself to a deskjet. I had this working before with LPRng+apsfilter+ghostscript, but now prefer CUPS. Other than that CUPS does queue control through a web interface, quotas, access control by user and group, page counting, has a modular design with many standard and third-party plugins, including backends for printing to PDF or printers hosted on Windows systems (which provides an easy way for me to print from my Mac OS 9 to a printer attached to a Windows 98 machine). CUPS should also integrate well with networks that have Mac OS X or modern Linux clients because they also use CUPS as their printing system.
But this thread is not about CUPS vs LPRng, it's about samba printing. If you want to print to CUPS without samba, you can use IPP or LPR (needs to be enabled with a db key, but don't: use IPP instead).
Nigel, feel free to contact me off-list if you want help troubleshooting your client setup.

[Nigel]

Problem solved.

It turned out to be a consequence of my uninstalling and reinstalling and not geting it quite right. Thanks Robert for pointing me in the right direction.

Now I've got it sorted it provides much better facilities than I had before.