Linux® For Dummies®, 8th Edition

Troubleshooting

In an ideal world, things should be working just fine for you. You should be able to map any Windows workstation or server on your network to the new Linux print server, and print to any locally connected printer on the server.

However, things don’t always go as planned. There are plenty of opportunities for things to go wrong in the network world. Here are a few things to watch out for if things aren’t working with your print server:

✓	Test the local printer: We can’t stress this step enough. We’ve run into plenty of situations where Administrators have spent countless hours trying to troubleshoot a network printer problem only to eventually find out that the local system can’t even print.
	Make sure that you can send print jobs from the Linux system to the local printer, and that the print job comes out OK. Often a mismatched PPD driver can cause odd behavior with printers.
✓	Remember to allow guest printing: By default, Fedora configures Samba to block guest printing and doesn’t provide an easy way to enable it. If you don’t manually edit the smb.conf file to enable guest printing, no one is able to use the shared printer (which kind of defeats the purpose of sharing it).
✓	Check both global and local printer sharing: The Fedora Printer Configuration window provides two locations that must be set for each printer. The global Server Settings section must be set to enable sharing published printers, and the Local Printer must be set for sharing. If either of these settings ...