Windows printing to CUPS via Samba
I don't know where to post this so I'll put it here.
Does anyone have any experience with using samba to share CUPS printers to windows? I have it working, but it is extremely unstable.
Software: Debian Testing on the server. Samba 2.2.3a-14, CUPS 1.1.19.
Printer: HP2200dn
Clients: Windows 2K SP4, Windows XP SP1
I've tried every setup I could to try to get something that works reliably. I've used every driver that could possibly work in CUPS. I prefer the pxl_mono driver since it gives the best quality. The problem there is the cups windows driver (the driver that allows windows to print to the samba port) crashes Word 2000 consistently. Word XP prints fine with it though. But since most of the clients use 2000, I had to try something else.
So what I did was set up a RAW queue in CUPS and used HP's PCL6 driver to make it print. This solution allows word 2000 to print, but the print properties sometimes can take a long time to come up, printer preferences won't save, and occasionally A rogue docment will crash the printer.
Now this is the interesting part. When I say crash the printer, I mean all three LED's on the printer stay on solid and when I access port 631 of the printer it says its printing. But its not. any subsequent document sent to it goes disappears. I power cycle the printer. If I print the same document again it crashes it just the same.
It's the strangest thing... 90% of the stuff I send to it prints fine. But I occassionally come accross a rogue document that will kill the printer completely every time. And its not like these rogue documents are anything unusual either... last one was a Word document 12pt Times througout, just a couple of pages. I can print rogue documents using the pxl_mono driver, works fine. But a rogue document will not print on any machine using the PCL6 to RAW CUPS system.
I am completely at a loss here... samba works solid, so I really doubt thats a problem. The logs don't show anything unusual, when printing a rogue document.
Anyone out there see anything like this before?
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