Topic: Printing problems

[andymcp]

I'm having serious grief printing to a network printer on my SME box (SME Server 6.0.1-01), using CUPS, from XP clients. I've trawled round the forums here, and come up with some great assistance along the way that helped me reach where I am now. Basically, I've added the advanced workgroup contrib, enabled guest access, then manually changed the 50printers files, updated the smb.conf, and so now I have all the right settings in place and the printer is visible on the network. Hoorah, I thought.

But, when I go to print a file (any file), the network printer takes an absolute age to find on the XP client. Eventually after a couple of Windows messages telling me it can wait longer if I like, the printer is found. The document then begins spooling, but takes so long that it crashes the app and the printer connection. Eventually, if I bail out of the app completely, the printer will start churning out however much of the document had processed to date.

Where do I start on this one? The setup is that the printer is plugged into the USB port (and appears against USB#1 in the CUPS port listing) - would trying it with a serial cable be worth a shot? It's set with a raw queue, using a local driver on the client. Any suggestions - would an upgrade of the SME platform solve this?

[andymcp]

Just an update unfortunately, not mecessarily a solution. I bailed out of the epson printer I was trying to attach to the server, and instead went with a samsung B&W printer, attached by serial cable instead of USB. Still takes quite a while to load the print request, or to agree to use the printer in the applications on the XP client, but has managed to print documents without crashing the apps so far.

Could the previous problem have been a USB issue?  

[jackl]

Andy,

I have seen similar problems to this before using windows XP.
The solution from microsoft is to setup the printer as a local printer as opposed to a network printer and instead of using local lpt1 choose the path to the network printer.
I don't exactly understand the logic behind this, but it has worked for us on several occasions. So maybe it may solve your problem.

Regards
Jack

[jackl]

Andy,

I have seen similar problems to this before using windows XP.
The solution from microsoft is to setup the printer as a local printer as opposed to a network printer and instead of using local lpt1 choose the path to the network printer.
I don't exactly understand the logic behind this, but it has worked for us on several occasions. So maybe it may solve your problem.

Regards
Jack

[andymcp]

Cheers Jack - will give that a whirl with the Epson later when I'm back at base.