Hi All,

I thought I made this post this morning but never saw it go up on the board. Not sure what happened. Anyhoo, here is my technical question & I really hope somebody has come across this one before.

Basically, it's like this, I have a side-job where a customer is running an old DOS application to run their business using windows 98/XP workstations that run the DOS app. I configured a Redhat 7.1 samba server (with fault tolerant backup server) for them back in the early 2000s & its version of Samba 2.2, I eventually made it work with all of their systems for printing & secure file sharing ("secure" for them anyway).

Fast forward to 2011 & they would like to replace the aging Redhat servers with Ubuntu 10.10. So I set that up & got the following components working with the default install + patches of Ubuntu (using apt-get install samba):

Windows XP:
1.) Password protected share access.
2.) Can browse Samba from Network Neighborhood.
3.) Print from XP Windows to HP network printer through Samba.
4.) Print from XP DOS terminal to HP network printer through Samba.

XP is pretty much ready to go. Now,

Windows 98:
1.) Password protected share access.
2.) Can browse Samba from Network Neighborhood. (this was tough!).
3.) Print from XP Windows to HP network printer through Samba.

Note: CANNOT Print from Windows 98 DOS terminal to HP network printer through Samba!

When I setup the LPT1 from net use on DOS to point to the Samba share, I then test by running DOS Edit, typing test, & then File->Print. It states that it can't print to LPT1 and asks to Retry, Cancel or Exit. No errors are given on the Samba side & Windows 98 doesn't seem to have an Event Viewer to tell me what's wrong. The whole thing works with Redhat 7.1 Samba though. Good old Samba 2.2. SIGH.

So what I did was use my VMware Workstation & built an Ubuntu 10.10 workstation with Samba, built an XP workstation & Windows 98 vm image. I didn't have network printing, so I setup CUPS-PDF to print to PDF files in Samba. As with the "production" installs of their business, I got everything working just fine except DOS LPT1 on Windows 98. So I can get the same error in a test environment basically & it's still puzzling.

I've searched all over google & I can't seem to find anything that can explain to me what it takes to print from DOS to a Samba server. In Samba 2.2 it basically just worked. With Samba 3.3, I have no clue what's blocking the print. At first I thought it was due to failures to browse Network Neighborhood from Windows 98, but I figured out how to resolve that & still the error with Windows 98 DOS printing.

Does anyone have any ideas on what I should do to figure this out or what I should RTFM next to resolve the issue? Only thing I can think of is line by line comparison of netparm -v between the two systems or finding a VMware image (or install one) of old DOS with networking & see if there were any instructions out there on making that work with the latest Samba. However, it would be extremely easy if somebody else already knew the settings I need to crack this! :-) Or at least some powerful hints to get me in the right direction.

Thanks all,
Centisteed.

I haven't had a chance to do any further tests, but it
looks like all of the clients will simply be upgraded
to new machines running Windows 7 in the near future.
So long Windows 95/98 and its DOS. It would have been
interesting to have gotten it to work.