Printer shares not working since upgrade to samba 3.5.0 - SOLVED-ish

Question

I share my printer with my wife's XP laptop and another linux box.  This has been the position for the past 2 years or so, without any problems at all.  Yesterday I did my first reboot for a couple of weeks, and the first, therefore, since samba / smbclient upgraded to 3.5.0.  I can no longer print from the XP or other linux boxes.  Samba logs the error as :
laptop (10.0.0.5) connect to service Oki initially as user visitor (uid=1001, gid=1001) (pid 12634)
[2010/03/13 18:31:51.509666,  0] printing/print_cups.c:108(cups_connect)
  Unable to connect to CUPS server /var/run/cups/cups.sock:631 - Interrupted system call
Setting cups logging to debug, the closest entries to the above attempt is as follows :
D [13/Mar/2010:18:31:21 +0000] cupsdAcceptClient: 13 from localhost (Domain)
D [13/Mar/2010:18:31:21 +0000] Report: clients=1
D [13/Mar/2010:18:31:21 +0000] Report: jobs=500
D [13/Mar/2010:18:31:21 +0000] Report: jobs-active=0
D [13/Mar/2010:18:31:21 +0000] Report: printers=1
D [13/Mar/2010:18:31:21 +0000] Report: printers-implicit=0
D [13/Mar/2010:18:31:21 +0000] Report: stringpool-string-count=1334
D [13/Mar/2010:18:31:21 +0000] Report: stringpool-alloc-bytes=6496
D [13/Mar/2010:18:31:21 +0000] Report: stringpool-total-bytes=18208
D [13/Mar/2010:18:31:21 +0000] cupsdReadClient: 13 WAITING Closing on EOF
D [13/Mar/2010:18:31:21 +0000] cupsdCloseClient: 13
D [13/Mar/2010:18:31:21 +0000] cupsdAcceptClient: 13 from localhost (Domain)
I [13/Mar/2010:18:31:21 +0000] Generating SSL server key...
E [13/Mar/2010:18:32:12 +0000] Unable to create SSL server key file "/etc/cups/ssl/server.key" - No such file or directory
D [13/Mar/2010:18:32:12 +0000] cupsdCloseClient: 13
I am guessing tht the "WAITING Closing on EOF" part may be important.
Other aspects of samba do not appear to be affected. I can mount shares on the remote computers, use smbclient etc.
Googling is not getting me anywhere.
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Last edited by perseus (2010-03-14 18:54:41)

Answer 1

I have had similar issues at my office.......I had a hylafax server (also sharing a couple printers via samba) running on debian 5 (samba 3.2) and upgraded it to debian 6 (samba 3.5). and it was samba printer sharing hell after that. What would happen is I would get samba logs full of the same jibberish
[2011/02/25 15:11:20.201234,  0] lib/util_sock.c:1432(get_peer_addr_internal)
  getpeername failed. Error was Transport endpoint is not connected
  write_data: write failure in writing to client 0.0.0.0. Error Connection reset by peer
[2011/02/25 15:11:20.201249,  0] smbd/process.c:79(srv_send_smb)
  Error writing 4 bytes to client. -1. (Transport endpoint is not connected)
[2011/02/25 15:43:20.134201,  0] lib/util_sock.c:675(write_data)
[2011/02/25 15:43:20.134220,  0] lib/util_sock.c:1432(get_peer_addr_internal)
  getpeername failed. Error was Transport endpoint is not connected
  write_data: write failure in writing to client 0.0.0.0. Error Connection reset by peer
[2011/02/25 15:43:20.134234,  0] smbd/process.c:79(srv_send_smb)
  Error writing 4 bytes to client. -1. (Transport endpoint is not connected)
I only post this here since I think it was more of a samba problem than a debian problem and we seem to be the only ppl out there talking about it......... the getpeername seemed to be the problem (to me anyway) and what would happen on our 25 or so XP home clients is that you would print but it wouldnt go ANYWHERE. Cups was not even recieving the jobs since samba was not passing the jobs to cups.
It seems to me that the XP machines were not finding the server by its hostname so I messed around with changing the clients to map the printer by ip address instead of by hostname and it helped "some" but it still had big time glitchyness.
the only conclusion I could come to in my mind is that this reminded me of back in the day when we had a win98se computer sharing a printer and the windows XP systems would hang for up to 2 min while trying to access the printer. The problem back then amounted to win XP not wanting to downstep to the older way of windows98's password encryption. So I started changing my smb.conf to allow guest on the printer, changed the mask to 777 and I even wrote up a whole new smb.conf from scratch to work on security = share no authentication, allow from everyone 777 etc etc.............STILL had problems.
So I ended up throwing together a new server from a spare machine and installing debian 5.0.3 (with samba 3.2.5) and swapping it out yesterday........now EVERYTHING works fine.
my educated guess here is that the new samba is probobly geared more towards vista & win7 than it is XP (since XP is a pretty old dog these days). I would loved to have worked this issue out but we just could not have the downtime any longer......so it looks like I am not going to be updating for a long time (which I now is not really the best policy) but it has to work.
I hope this helps.....trust me you are not the only ones having this problem.