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We are migrating to Windows Print Services at my University and we would like to use ksmbprintd to provide a more seamless user experience for Mac printing.
One of our print servers is going to be used for our lab environments where we will be using an extra piece of software that layers on top of Windows print services for enhanced print accounting as well as a Web Print feature for an authenticated, wireless printing option for students with laptops.
In order to clearly indicate which printer folks wish to use, we are naming things in a not-nerdy, clear text, with spaces, and proper capitalization scheme.
What we found is that using standard Mac OS 10.5/10.6 SMB printing works fine (but prompts for password of course) to printers with space in the name as long as you replace the space with a "%20" in the declaration (see NOTE in article http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3049).
We did more testing and found that you can have long names no problem, but as soon as you declare a printer like:
ksmb://servername.fdqn/my%20printer%20hates%20spaces
you get a very full bucket of fail. Looking through the logs I am not seeing any indication of a failure or reason why this might be happening. A Kerberos ticket gets created for the target server if it did not exist previously, the job completes and leaves the local spooler just fine but never arrives at the Windows queue. There is no indication on the server that the job was ever sent to it. We are using a Win2k3 SP2 print server.
Again, if I use smb://servername.fdqn/my%20printer%20hates%20spaces and provide credentials via the Apple authentication method, it works perfectly; only with the ksmb do we have this problem.
Any ideas why this might be happening? Any specific logs I should look at on the server or my clients to track more info down?
Any help would be appreciated as we would like to have clear naming for folks to find the correct printer through the web interface. Our meantime work-around is likely going to be underscores, but it's 2010; can't we have spaces and long names just work already?
Jerrod Thomas
Portland State University
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Ok, so I've finally looked into this, and it isn't a ksmb problem, it's a CUPS problem. From the lpadmin man page(s):
Unlike the System V printing system, CUPS allows printer names to contain any printable character except SPACE, TAB, "/", or "#"
So from that, you cannot connect to printers with spaces in the queue name. I would suggest, if possible, talking to the SysAdmins (if it isn't you), and either replacing the space with _, or simply setup another queue that points to the same printer, but without spaces, for the Macs. We have to do something similar, but for & and not space, (we have printers setup with B&W queues, and they put "B&W" in the queue name, which either KSMB or CUPS doesn't like.
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