Andreas Klemm on Tue, 9 Oct 2001 10:10:10 +0200 (CEST)


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Re: Newby help please


On Tue, Oct 09, 2001 at 09:12:15AM +0200, David Green wrote:
> 
> My OS is FreeBSD 4.3, I'm trying to print via a network "through" a
> Windoze 98 machine, using Samba on my machine.  I'm using LPRng. My

Why LPRng ? I dislike it because of a certain amount of complexity
and a logfile format I really don't like, because it makes debugging
apsfilter harder, because every executed line of the apsfilter shellscript
is prepended by a loing timestamp, which makes it very ugly to read.

If you don't need any of LPRng's additional feature I'd strongly
advise you as a Unix newbie, to choose the normal lpd which comes
with FreeBSD. It does its job very well.

> I have tried the gs printer drivers pcl3 and lbp8, as well as trying to
> print as a guest and as "me" through samba.  When I try to print a test
> page using 'T' in setup I get nothing - no error messages, nothing.

I'd suggest you read the smbclient manual page and try printing
to your windows printer manually on the command line.

Maybe you create a valid short print file on the windows printer
by printing onto the local filesystem, then transfer it binary
to Unix. The mtools from the ports collection for example help
you to read a file directly from a DOS floppy.

Or you upload it to unix via ftp. Don't forget to type in "bin"
for binary mode, otherwise the file gets modified ...

If you have a valid print file, then try to pipe it through smbclient.
Look into the apsfilter script, how apsfilter invokes smbclient, to get
a feeling, what commandline options you need ...

Once you have this working, then you can enable debugging in apsfilter
via set -x switch in the apsfilter script and watch the logfile
(see /etc/printcap lf=....path....). Then you'll see what apsfilter
does. Especially the last actions are the most interesting, since
then smbclient is called and you should compare how apsfilter and
how you invoked smbclient ...

Then patch apsfilter to get a working printout and write me an
e-mail, what was wrong ...

	Andreas ///

-- 
Andreas Klemm
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