[Xastir] Samba Peculiarity

[Tom Russo]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 11:00:13AM -0800, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <kf4lvz at yahoo.com> flavor, containing:
> > Niiiiiice.  I've got samba running at home for no other
> > reason than to share
> > printers to the single old Losedows machine, and on the
> > laptop solely to allow
> > the windows virtual machine to use the printers on the
> > linux host.  Assuming
> > bonjour works on Losedows 2K, I'd much rather pitch
> > Samba (which is an 
> > enormous pain in the butt to install, configure, and
> > maintain).
> 
> I've never had any difficulty with Samba on Linux to share my printer to all 
> the Windows machines so I'm a bit surprised.  I don't use CUPS on the Linux 
> machine, though, I just have Samba pass the raw printer instructions 
> straight through.  In fact I have a hard time removing CUPS from the system 
> because the package manager constantly fights with me.

It is the CUPS thing that was the source of the biggest fights.  Once set up
properly, sharing a CUPS printer through Samba is way cool because it presents 
to Windows nothing more than a PostScript printer and even provides windows 
drivers for that printer that get installed automagically when the windows 
user chooses "Add Printer" and selects the network printer.  It's setting that 
up that can be a hair-ripping experience because of various issues with 
permissions.  And I have to go through it again every time I add a new printer
to the server. 

I resisted using CUPS on my server machine for several years, and did as you
did, passing raw printer instructions from Windows.  This required the windows
machine to have the right driver for whatever printer was on the server machine,
and that did get to be a hassle.  But the main thing that forced me to go to
CUPS was the sheer number of packages that absolutely insisted on it as a 
requirement.

Now I won't go back, because CUPS actually rocks.  I've struggled every time
I got a new printer with strange hacks, and CUPS has fixed most of it.

> However, I don't see how the OS X program is going to help a Linux machine unless Bonjour is entirely command line or kernel level.

Bonjour is apparently a client that allows OSX and Losedows machines to use 
CUPS servers on the linux box without needing Samba to fake out Microsoft 
Networking.  We already have one OSX box in the house that talks to the
CUPS server on my machine so that all the printers are on one server.  I
didn't know that the component of OSX that allowed that was called "bonjour" --
I just thought it was a CUPS client.

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236        http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
  In some cultures what I do would be considered normal. 
                                  -- Ineffective daily affirmation