Chapter 7. Printing

File serving is considered by most to be Samba's bread and butter. However, pulling up a close second in justifications for deploying Samba is its capability to centrally manage printers and to make them available across a network to Windows clients. The chapter focuses on the steps necessary to add print services to Samba's configuration as well as the details for sending print jobs from Unix and Linux clients to remote SMB/CIFS printers via smbclient.

Because Samba relies on a functioning, underlying print system, we will concentrate on sharing printers that have previously been configured on the server. If you need to refresh yourself on Unix printing details, three good references are Network Printing, by Matthew Gast and Todd Radermacher, Essential System Administration, by Æleen Frisch, and Running Linux, by Matt Welsh et al., all published by O'Reilly.