Some notes first: Fedora Core 1 (2 node HA cluster, heartbeat & drbd) Cups 1.1.20 Samba 3.0.4 400 Windows 2000/XP clients 50 print queues HP Laserjets, Xerox colour multifunctionals, Ricoh mulitfunctionals, HP DesignJet plotters
2000+ print jobs/day 8000+ pages/day 5GB + print data/day I have a custom printer accounting application that is run by samba when a print job arrives at the server. This application supports PCL5, PCL6, postscript and HPGL2 blah blah blah. PROBLEM: Because samba and cups are now tightly integrated, samba does not offer the facility to issue a custom print command (print command =) when you tell samba the printing system is cups. Samba quietly ignores any custom print command, postexec, and preexec directives. The right thing to do would be to write a cups filter to invoke the printer accounting, however, the cups command line arguments to a filter program and the environment variables seem lacking some key pieces of information, namely, the remote host and remote ip address of the client. So, in my case, I must break the relationship between cups and samba and tell samba that the printing system is bsd or lprng in order to use my printer accounting application. This is where all hell breaks loose. There seems to be no valid lpq command that samba can hand off to cups that reports anything that samba understands. Worse, the default lpq command (lpq -P%p) invokes (I assume) cups lpstat program. Under the right (or wrong) conditions, this has brought my server to its knees. I don't know what's wrong with lpstat but it seems to be horribly inefficient, especially when 400 windows desktops query the samba server for print queue status (which it is unable to report anyway). In order to stop the samba/cups duo from crashing my server (doesn't really crash, it just can't do anything, like a self inflicted DOS attack) i have to map the samba lpq command to /bin/false. So here are my two questions: 1. Is it samba or cups that prevents samba from using a custom print command 2. What the heck is wrong with lpstat. Even a script that runs lpsat (multiple times) to collect different pieces of information seems to tax the system. Thanks Greg -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba