43.5. Adding a New Printer Share
The default Samba configuration usually contains the special printers share, which indicates that all printers on your system are available to SMB clients. A specific printer, however, can be explicitly shared. This may be better than having them all shared automatically, as it allows you to set different options for each printer or exclude some from sharing altogether.
Before printing and the browsing of printers in Samba will work properly, it must be configured to use the right print system for your UNIX box. See Section 43.15 “Configuring Printers” for details of how to set this. If it is set incorrectly, the server will use the wrong commands for listing printers and submitting jobs, which may cause the automatically generated list of printers to be empty, or print requests to fail.
To make a printer available to SMB clients, follow these steps:
1. | On the module's main page, click on the Create a new printer share link above or below the table. This will take you to the Print Share Creation form shown in Figure 43.3. Figure 43.3. The printer share creation form.
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2. | In the Share name field, make sure the first button is selected and enter a unique alphanumeric name for your share into the text box, like hplaser. This should be the same as the name of the UNIX printer you select in the next step to avoid confusion. If an automatically created printer share with the same name already exists, this new one will override it. |
3. | From the UNIX printer menu, select the printer to make available to SMB clients. This list is taken from the Printer Administration module (covered in Chapter 22). If Default is chosen, the print system's default printer will be used. |
4. | To disable this printer so that it cannot be used, change the Available? field to No. |
5. | To hide this printer from the list that appears when the server is browsed, change the Browseable? field to No. It will still be directly accessible using a \servernameprintername path though. |
6. | In the Spool directory field, you can enter the name of a directory in which temporary files for printing are stored. Leave it empty to use Samba's default, which will usually work fine. |
7. | In the Share comment field, enter a short description for this print, such as Office HP Laserjet 5. |
8. | Click the Create button to add the share to the Samba configuration. Your browser will be returned to the module's main page, which will now include the new printer in the table. |
9. | Click on the new share name to bring up its editing page. |
10. | Click on the Security and Access Control icon to display the share's security form. |
11. | The Guest access? field determines if clients are allowed to print to this printer without logging in to the server. The available options are: None Only authenticated users will be granted access. Yes Anyone will be allowed to access the share, but unauthenticated clients will be treated as guests. Clients who have logged in will have print jobs submitted under their login names. Guest only All clients, authenticated or not, will be treated as guests. |
12. | To set the UNIX user as whom guests submit print jobs, change the Guest UNIX user field. This doesn't matter much, unless your printer system is configured to block certain users. |
13. | Click the Save button at the bottom of the form to return to the printer's editing page. |
14. | Click on the Printer Options icon. |
15. | If this printer is to be used by Windows clients and does not have a UNIX driver installed, enter its complete make and model into the Printer driver field. This must match exactly the name to which Windows refers to so clients know which driver to install. If None is selected, users adding this printer to their Windows systems will be asked to choose the printer model from a list, instead. If the UNIX printer selection in Step 3 is already set up with a driver, then clients must submit jobs in Postscript format instead of the native data format that the printer users (because the driver will do the conversion). In this case, you can enter the name of a printer that uses Postscript natively, such as Apple LaserJet II. |
16. | Finally, hit the Save button on this form. The printer share is now ready for use by Windows clients. |
Just as with file shares, printers can be edited and deleting by clicking on their names in the table on the module's main page. The special printers share can be modified as well; however, many options do not make sense to set for it, such as the UNIX printer or Printer driver.