Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote: > I haven't done this but was under the impression that samba > could associate any windows print driver (not just postscript) > with a shared printer and it would auto-install the driver on > the windows client when the printer was set up there. Yes, and that requires some manual setup on the server for each new printer that is not straight-forward. You have to get the string and other files _exact_, and some vendor programs are not exactly built for such redistribution. Typically you have to install on one Windows system, then share it, then grab those files back off, and you finally have just the fileset. Then you've gotta comb through the INF for the strings. Not fun. Furthermore, vendor printer drivers tend to conflict with the NT spooler. A few years ago IKON came out and made a serious mess of one of my networks once because the guys went around installing the Lexmark and Ricoh drivers, which instantly conflicted with each other as well as the HP drivers. I caught them by the 5th system, before they destroyed any more. This is why I advocate either #3 or #4 if you have more than a few printers on a few servers. Using at least Postscript for everything means no inter-vendor mess. It also means that you have *1* driver, and everything becomes a matter of PPDs. With CUPS, you can make most printers look like a Postscript printer. If you use the CUPS driver for Windows with the CUPS-Samba integration, you do _not_ have to mess with the smb.conf and the printer strings at all! The CUPS driver for Windows lets Windows clients see the CUPS IPP service, and then it uses SMB to download the appropriate PPD (which is administered with _all_ options from the CUPS server itself). The CUPS-Samba integration means you run *1* CUPS command to republish the PPDs -- again, *0* smb.conf editing, setting up printer strings, etc... -- Bryan J. Smith | Sent from Yahoo Mail mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org | (please excuse any http://thebs413.blogspot.com/ | missing headers)