I checked through the archives and I didn't see this one. This has been driving me absolutely crazy for months now and I finally tumbled to what was going on.
I get hesitations of up to 2 minutes from some of our XP machines when printing to a printer on the Samba server. My first suspicion was that it was some kind of name resolving issue. I tried using the domain name of the Samba server (we have an 'inside' domain set up) and that fixed some of the XP boxes. Yesterday, I got a complaint from a person who was getting the 2 minute delay before printing and I ran over to his office and put in the DNS name of the inside interface (the LAN side) of the Samba server in the "Add Printer" thingy. Still got a 2 minute delay and "Access Denied" stuff. OK..I said...I'll short this out...I hate to do it, but I'll use the IP address of the Samba server and it won't have to look up anything. Still 2 minute delay before printing! Then I noticed that XP had changed the ip address shown in the "Printers and Faxes" icons. Huh? That's the OUTSIDE interface of the Samba server. That server is a gateway also and has two interfaces, one on the internet, one on the LAN. XP was changing the IP I gave it (the inside IP ) and replacing it with the outside IP! Then it hit me that it was getting "access denied" because it was trying to access port 138 through the firewall! Of course, port 138 is blocked to the outside world. I noticed that there had been quite a number of IP packets bouncing off the firewall rule that blocked 138. Hmmmm... So, I added a rule that says that packets emanating from our outside IPs (inside addresses would be NAT'd to the outside IPs) can be sent to port 138 on the Samba box and Voila! Instant printing! The packets are apparently going to the Samba server, being NAT'd to the outside interface and now they can come back in on port 138 and it works. Does anyone know what in the world is going on with this? Why would XP change the IP. By that I mean you say \\192.168.0.1\printername when you set up the printer and you look at the icon and it says \\The_Outside_IP\printername. Thanks! -- -Jim -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba
