Printers at my work are only accessible via Samba, with a valid username and password. I add them through the KDE System Settings->Printers dialogue, as SMB printers, using my username and password. On initial setup, they work fine (both a Samsung CLP-500 using the splix drivers and a Kyocera Mita 3035 using the default drivers that ship with Ubuntu). On reboot, they no longer work, as in no document or test page sent to either printer seems to get through, no error messages come back (that I have found), it just says "Document successfully sent to the printer" and that's the last I hear.
Similar problems seem to have been mentioned on the KDE-print-devel list, e.g. at http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-print-devel/2007-February/001563.html, so this may well be an upstream bug. The problem seems to be related to the device uri. When a printer has initially been added, in the KDE printer setup program main page, selecting the printer shows its info, which contains the following line:
Device: smb://workgroup/SERVER/networkprintername
After reboot, its info appears instead as
Device: smb://username:pass (truncated)
In both cases, these strings match the value returned by 'lpstat -v localprintername'. I've tried manually setting the Device info back to what it initially appears as, via 'lpadmin -p localprintername -v smb://workgroup/SERVER/networkprintername' but this doesn't appear to fix the problem.
It's almost certainly related to the fact that my network samba password contains a hash ('#') character. Before reboot, when the printers are working fine, my username and password do not appear in the Device info. After reboot, when the printers no longer work, the Device info contains my username, my password up to but not including the # character, and nothing else. The workgroup, server and printer name have all disappeared.
I'm aware that accessing a printer via username/password over samba is not recommended by the cups team for security reasons, but I don't have much choice. It's strange to me that the printer works initially, but something in the reboot process screws with the settings and causes this breakage. It's not the end of the world, but I'd like to find some kind of workaround for this and I currently just don't know enough about how the printing system works to go any further. I've tried looking for a config file that stores the network credentials for use of the printer, so that I can escape the # by changing it to a %23 (if that's the correct uri escape character), but so far haven't been able to find it. Ideally of course, a proper fix would be available as opposed to a workaround.
If this is an upstream bug, please let me know so I can report it there instead/as well. At the moment I'm not sure if the problem lies with smbspool, or with the KDE Printer setup's method of hiding the username & password for a samba printer uri, or something else.
For info, I'm running Kubuntu 7.04, currently fully up-to-date.
Thanks for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better.
This bug did not have a package associated with it, which is important for ensuring that it gets looked at by the proper developers.
You can learn more about finding the right package at https:/
I have classified this bug as a bug in "cupsys".