cups/samba integration problems

[Helge Blischke]

Greg Saunders wrote:
> 
> 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 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.
> 

Have you looked at the latest samba versions? (3.0x with x > 2)?
There should be the possibility to use printing = cups with some
additional
options. (I have not yet looked into the details, as 3.02 works fine for
me).

Helge

-- 
H.Blischke at srz-berlin.de
H.Blischke at srz-berlin.com
H.Blischke at acm.org