CUPS print server with WinXP client
 

I have a desktop running FC5 with an HP Photosmart C4180 connected via USB. I can print perfectly form the desktop.
I also have my office laptop running Windows XP SP2 with the HP 4180 drivers installed. I have set up a network print queue on the laptop as an LPD port. The two machines can communicate via the network (I access the laptop via RDP from the desktop). When I send a print job from the laptop to the network queue on the desktop, the print job arrives in the queue but does not print. I have checked the CUPS job queue and it shows the job as held. If I hit release, it says "Job released for printing." When I check the job history it says "aborted". Here is an extract from /var/log/cups/error_log

I [19/Oct/2007:10:41:50 +0100] Started "/usr/lib/cups/cgi-bin/jobs.cgi" (pid=4747)
E [19/Oct/2007:10:41:50 +0100] Job ID 377 has no files! Canceling it!
I [19/Oct/2007:10:41:50 +0100] Job 377 was released by "root".

Could this be a print filtering problem?

Remember printing works fine locally from the linux desktop.

Any suggestions please?

Thanks in advance.

Andy

I do not know anything about the method you are using but:

I have a desktop running Slackware 11 connected to a printer through the parallel port. I have a laptop which is networked with samba and able to print via CUPS. The only configuration that needed doing was samba.conf

Yeah thanks. I've tried all that to no avail. This used to work fine with the old LPD. CUPS has given me nothing but trouble. Why fix something that isn't broken?

Andy

You say you can connect with rdp but can your users see their linux home directories from XP with samba? Just wondering if this could be a samba problem rather than a CUPS problem.

Now that's a good point. Although going back one step, I am trying to print from XP to the Linux queue using the LPD protocol (I have installed the lpd client in windows and cups-lpd is active in linux). However, I have also tried using the windows printing protocol and i get to the point when setting up the remote queue where it asks for authentication but this fails. And I have just tried to connect to a samba shared drive on the linux machine from XP but no response. I usually connect to a share on XP from Konqueror so I hadn't noticed this failure before. But that still doesn't explain why I can't print via lpd, does it? AS I said, the print job arrives in the queue but cups aborts the job for some reason.

Andy

With samba I found that I had to log on to XP using the same password as for my linux login.

I have set up a samba user associated with my linux account and i have also replicated my XP account and password in linux but neither has provided connectivity.

With my Samba servers, I maintain (within CUPS) two print queues for a printer.
One is a raw print queue, which is accessed by the Windows machines. As the Windows machines have their own printer drivers installed, they format the print pages, and the formatted output is passed as is via the raw print queue to the printer.
The other print queue is used by the Samba servers only, any print pages are formatted by the drivers within CUPS and then sent to the printers.

May be you might find some help in the networking forum.