[csw-users] cups and smb printing

[Markus Mayer]

Hi,
  
>  i made the usual link from smbspool to smb but nothing worked. I
>  eventually checked smbspool, the binary doesn't exist in CSW's
>  version of cups.

What version of CUPS are you using? For quite some time now the CSWcups
package (and since the upgrade to 1.2.3 last week CSWcupsd) created
this symlink automatically when installed.

>From my own box at home (where I use CUPS over Samba myself):

$ ls -l /opt/csw/lib/cups/backend
total 215
drwxr-xr-x    2 root  bin      512 Sep  8 10:39 .
drwxr-xr-x    9 root  bin      512 Sep  8 10:39 ..
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root  bin    11016 Aug  2  2005 canon
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root  bin    10892 Aug  2  2005 epson
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root  root       3 Sep  8 10:39 http -> ipp
-rwx------    1 root  bin    31604 Sep  8 10:21 ipp
-rwx------    1 root  bin    24696 Sep  8 10:21 lpd
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root  bin    20012 Sep  8 10:21 parallel
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root  bin    11236 Sep  8 10:21 scsi
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root  bin    18332 Sep  8 10:21 serial
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root  root      21 Sep  8 10:39 smb -> ../../../bin/smbspool
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root  bin    42384 Sep  8 10:21 snmp
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root  bin    20104 Sep  8 10:21 socket
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root  bin    23964 Sep  8 10:21 usb

And:

$ pkgchk -l -p /opt/csw/lib/cups/backend/smb
Pathname: /opt/csw/lib/cups/backend/smb
Type: symbolic link
Source of link: ../../../bin/smbspool
Referenced by the following packages:
        CSWcupsd
Current status: installed

Okay, it's been verified, the link is really part of CSWcupsd.

smbspool, however, is *not* part of CUPS. It is part of Samba and thus
provided by CSWsambaclient. You can use
  http://www.blastwave.org/filesearch.php
to see which package contains which file before even installing them.

>  If you do a search for smbspool, you will find they are all symbolic
>  links that are never resolved to a binary.

How? Where? Can you provide the command you used and the output you
got? For me it looks like this:

$ ls -l /opt/csw/bin/smbspool
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root  bin  1412940 Aug  9 06:13 /opt/csw/bin/smbspool

$ pkgchk -l -p  /opt/csw/bin/smbspool
Pathname: /opt/csw/bin/smbspool
Type: regular file
Expected mode: 0755
Expected owner: root
Expected group: bin
Expected file size (bytes): 1412940
Expected sum(1) of contents: 51395
Expected last modification: Aug 09 06:13:14 2006
Referenced by the following packages:
        CSWsambaclient
Current status: installed

>  To fix / bodge, i simply changed one of the symbolic links to point
>  to solaris' smbspool (i'm using solaris 10 which has it installed).

That should work for now, but it'll most likely break next time you
update CSWcupsd. The package will remove the 'smb' link you created
(since it's part of the package, unless your CUPS package is really
old) and it'll create one pointing to the CSW version of smbspool
again, which you don't seem to be having.
  
>  everything now working.

Glad to hear it's working for you now. Just be aware that an upgrade
might break it. My suggestion is to get CSWsambaclient installed on
your box and let CUPS use that. That's how it's meant to be. That's
what I use myself and I'll make sure that works across updates.

Regards,
-Markus