Sometime after I'd upgraded the hydrus printer/file server to FreeBSD 8.1, I discovered that printing from windows clients was not working. As far as the clients were concerned, a print was successful, but nothing appeared at the printer. During the upgrade to FreeBSD 8.1, I'd elected to move to Samba 3.4 from Samba 3.0, so I figured that was the likeliest cause of the problem.
I checked all the samba log files, but there was no trace of any
errors. I looked at the smb.conf file for mismatches
between it and the real world. The printer stanza was defined as
follows:
[printers] comment = All Printers path = /var/spool/samba browseable = no # Set public = yes to allow user 'guest account' to print guest ok = no writable = no printable = yes
Hmm, looks OK. How does that compare with /var/spool?
clientmqueue/ lpd/ opielocks/ samba34/ lock/ mqueue/ output/
Aha! A mismatch between the spool directory defined in
smb.conf and the one that actually existed. Reviewing the
provided samba 3.4 smb.conf.sample confirmed that the new
version had renamed the spool file (or I had at some time in the
past).
Modifying the name of the spool file in smb.conf and
restarting samba had printing working again.
