Sharing a Printer with Samba

Disclaimer: I have no idea if this post is still applicable. Technology has changed so much since I wrote this 4 years ago, but just in case it's useful to somebody somewhere......

When I first shared my printer with the default RedHat 8 smb.conf, I could print from windows but had an annoying "Access denied: " error message and could not see jobs in the printer queue. If you're reading this page, first find out what print system you are using: LPRng is the one used for Redhat 7 and 8, CUPS is the prefered system now and is used in RedHat 9. I suggest going with CUPS.

This is the best site I've for setting up CUPS / Samba: http://www.buberel.org/linux/cups-samba.php

If you are using LPRng, then the following lines must be added to the smb.conf file.

• The three commands (print, lpq and lprm) allows the windows Printers dialog to update the printer queue (list and remove print jobs).
• The last line "use client driver = yes" eliminates a windows error of "Access denied".

[global]
# (obviously a lot of other stuff not shown here)
# The print command by which data is spooled to a printer under Linux.
   print command = lpr -r -P%p %s
 
# The print command by which job queue information (printer status)
# can be obtained.
   lpq command = lpq -P%p
  
# The print command by which unwanted print jobs can be deleted
# from the queue.
   lprm command = lprm -P%p %j

[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
 use client driver = yes