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Using password protected Windows printers
Authored by: ichou on Mar 09, '03 06:14:43PM
The posts found on printing to Windows printers via SAMBA/CUPS/Gimp-Print are great. After much fighting with Windows, I finally got my wife's new iBook (MacOS X 10.2.4) to print to a very old Canon BubbleJet BJ-100 printer that is connected to an old Windows 98 box that I use as a file/print server and router for my home LAN.

There are two things that I needed to realize to allow this all to work. First of all, Gimp-Print does not provide any old BJ-100 drivers. However, I used the lowest end driver from the same manufacturer (BJC-30 -- the lowest end color Bubble Jet drivers for my old B&W inkjet). For people like me who have these old printers, I recommend people try drivers for the same manufacturer and see if one works.

The other very important detail was that I was fighting with the SMB// URI. I tried all the various permutations if username, password, workgroup, server name, and shared printer name that people have suggested to no avail. Finally I remembered that Domans and Workgroups were really a Windows NT addition, and Windows 9X, although they are capable of participating in a Workgroup, really don't care about much except username and password. So instead of all the fancy workgroup/server URI's, I simply used:

smb://user:pass@servername/printername

Spaces and all and it worked without complaint. I had all kinds of problems because my "workgroup" is "@HOME" (from the defunct excite@home ISP). I feared that messing with my workgroup would prevent the local broadband ISP's DHCP server that took over @home's customers from assigning my machine an IP address, but now I don't have to worry about it. MacOS prints to it fine.

I'm rediscovering the Mac with my wife's new computer, and the secret to the success of various tasks, such has printing to a password protected Windows printer or other such things, is that the simplest solution will probably work, so one should try the simplest solution rather than all the crazy stuff.

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