Problem:
With some Windows printer driver models the upload or download to/from UCS Samba fails.
Background:
Third party printer drivers for Windows can be uploaded to the UCS Samba print server to make them available to Windows clients for automatic download. Microsoft refers to this mechanism as “Point and Print”. Microsoft changed the mechanisms for driver distribution to Windows clients several times in the past (technical overview by Microsoft).
The version advertised by the print server impacts the behavior of the Windows Clients during upload and download of printer drivers. Some third party printer drivers are easy to upload and download, but there are others that expect newer print server behavior and fail to upload.
Samba supports this mechanism in general, but does not yet implement the latest version. This currently is work in progress.
Solutions:
This overview article provides a central entry point to a number of knowledge base articles providing in-depth workaround instructions for specific issues that we have solved in the past:
- Printer driver upload Howto in the UCS Manual
- Non-interactive installation of printer drivers from print servers fails on windows clients (Point and Print)
- Printer driver upload from a Windows-client doesn’t find the x64 device driver
- Printer driver upload via Windows-client fails with ‘Error in Application’
- Windows printer driver upload starts but aborts with the error code 0x0000023f