[K12OSN] Very frustrating!

[Joseph Bishay]

Hello,

So I have a feeling that there's some sort of evil force trying to
prevent me from getting this lab off the ground.

My latest trouble has to do with trying to get a printer working.  I
had it working once when I was using K12LTSP 5 (based on FC with LTSP
4.2) but now that I've upgraded to EL5 nothing is really working.
Here's the skinny:

1) Printer is USB HP Laserjet 1000

2) Printer works no problem when directly plugged into the server.
This isn't feasible because the server is not in the computer lab

3) The printer cannot be plugged into a thin client because it does
not work with JetDirect (as per this site
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/fastFaqLiteDocument?lc=en&cc=uk&dlc=en&
docname=bpj06101).  My printer shows up under "Exceptions and
unsupported printers", of course.

4) I was, under the older K12ltsp, able to get it to print by plugging
a WIN98 machine into the internet switch that the LTSP internet NIC
was also plugged into.  I then installed the printer on the WIN 98 and
shared it out.  Pointed LTSP to the share and printing was fine.
This, however, no longer works when I upgraded to CentOS.

5) When I try to replicate that scenario of using win 98, I find I am
able to browse the shares on the win98 machine from the LTSP server
but only if they are directories, NOT the printer shares!  This is the
case if I use LinNeighbourhood or Nautilus, or anything else.

6) I can force CUPS to point to the place where the printer share
SHOULD be: (smb:///PRINTSVR1/HPLJ_1000 or the IP version
smb:///192.168.1.250/HPLJ_1000) and printing will still not work -
gives the error: Unable to connect to CIFS host, will retry in 60
seconds...

7) This is the exact same win98 machine and printer that was before
working fine -- the only changes I can see are 1) the centos ltsp, and
2) the IPcop machine that is on the network now

Is there any hope?  I've even asked the IRC LTSP bot and it had no
good suggestions (typing "!BlowupPrinter" gave me "Error:
"BlowupPrinter" is not a valid command." at 1 am).

Thank you.

Joseph