Network printing in heterogenous environments Christoph Beyer Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron IT Notkestr Hamburg, Germany

DESY  ~300 printer and ~400 queues 1 2 SUN E250 running SOLARIS 2.7 with 1GB memory each as server 1 ~ jobs per month 1 No MAC and Novell support defacto 1 2 administrators 1 LPRng (slidely patched), IFHP 3.4.4, SAMBA 2.2

Printing DESY UNIX clients LPR SMB TCP / LPR - SOLARIS - LINUX - HP-UX - AIX - IRIX MICROSOFT clients - NT / 98 SPOOLASPOOLB - SOLARIS LPRng IFHP SAMBA 2.2

The server 1 Take advantage of the flexibility of UNIX as a backend for queuing jobs and talking to the printer. Use software to present the UNIX queues to the clients using their native protocols DESY: OS:SOLARIS 5.7 Printspooler:LPRng Filter:IFHP Tools:SAMBA Identical architecture, every printerqueues is served by either one machine or the other, every printer is known on both machines (failover)

UNIX clients 1 Running LPRng 1 Automatic update via cronjob, and client printcap in afs 1 BSD and SysV binaries on all machines 1 Nice LPRng features like failover, debugging

WINDOWS clients 1 Driver installation via the ‘add new printer’ wizzard 1 Download of printer configuration at printtime from the server via RPC 1 Internal job query and removal features of WINDOWS work 1 No need for any installation on the client !

SAMBA First release that supports the native Windows NT printing mechanismus implemented via MS-RPC, previous versions only supported LanMan printing calls 1 Support for downloading printer driver files to Windows 95/98/NT/200 clients upon demand 1 Uploading of printer drivers via the Windows NT ‘Add Printer Wizzard’ (APW) or the Imprints toolset 1 Support for NT Access Control Lists (ACL) on printer objects 1 Fully equivalent behaviour to a NT printspooler in all points (driver installation, printing procedure, queue query)

Windows printing using SAMBA 2.2 client - printer installation via NT ‘add new printer wizzard’ - downloading printer driver file upon demand (at print-time) - printjob transfer via SMB - printer queue lookup with the WINDOWS internal GUIS - NT / 98 SMB admin - NT / 98 SMB - uploading of printer drivers via the NT ‘add printer wizzard’ - preconfiguration of printer drivers spoola/b

Some screenshots Add new printer on client: Watching the queue:

Summary 1 SAMBA and LPRng together can fully support both, UNIX and WINDOWS clients using their native protocols to present queues, handle delete requests etc. 1 The SAMBA installation at DESY is a test environment right now and will go into production within the next few weeks 1 During the tests we did not see any problems presenting ~400 queues to the WINDOWS clients 1 Performance is OK 1 In case of hardware problems a third machine, running SAMBA can join the NT domaine and provide printing service using the netbios name of the broken server

Some useful stuff 1 For LPRng and IFHP 1 for SAMBA 1 Patched version: 1 HPNP, a snmp tool to query and configure jetdirectinterfaces at: 1 NPADMIN, a very nice tool to query and administrate any kind of printer: 1 Adobe Systems Inc: Postscript Language tutorial and Cookbook Addison-wesley 1 Network Printing by T. Rademacher & M. Gast O'Reilly