Hi. I encountered a very strange and sudden behavior change for my printer connected to Windows XP box. My ubuntu version is 8.04 LTS; samba's version is 3.0.28a-1ubuntu4.9; and cups's version is 1.3.7-1ubuntu3.6. I have been using these samba and cups to print things from my ubuntu boxes to this printer for a long time.
A couple of days ago, all of sudden, it stopped working. My printer jobs were queued but never printed. I checked the Printer Configuration, which says:
Device URL: smb://MSHOME/MYPC/Printer
as before.

Just in case, I changed this URL to the explicit IP address of my XP box at home as follows:
Device URL: smb://192.168.1.4/Printer

Then, it started working again. I do not understand why the previous setting stopped working and I have to put the explicity IP address now.
Since this IP 192.168.1.4 may change depending on the router setting, etc., it is much more convenient to set the Device URL the previous way.

I do not think that I made any change in XP, but I do not know whether some automatic windows update would cause such a behavior change or not.

Any suggestions/help would be greatly appreciated!
BVP

May be samba forgot who is "MSHOME"?

You can try to ping it: ping MSHOME.

Thanks for your suggestion.
In fact, I just tried it:
$ ping MSHOME
ping: unknown host MSHOME
So, the system doesn't recognize MSHOME.
What should I do to fix this?
As I said, I rebooted both my linux box and XP box, but nothing changed.

Best,
BVP

Do you really want to use smb://MSHOME/MYPC/Printer?

What is wrong with smb://192.168.1.4/Printer?

Well, nothing is wrong with explicitly setting the IP address, but yet, I have two things I want to say:
(1) Setting with MSHOME was working before, and I want to know why all of sudden it stopped working; and
(2) Depending on the wireless setting, my XP box's IP address changes from 192.168.1.4 because it is connected via wireless.

Best,
BVP

Look, this is from smb.conf:

# DNS Proxy - tells Samba whether or not to try to resolve NetBIOS names
# via DNS nslookups.

; wins support = yes
; wins server = w.x.y.z
; wins proxy = yes

Check if all of it works in windows.
And check if windows knows that it is "MSHOME".