[Pkg-samba-maint] Bug#695472: samba: cups smb:// printers broken after upgrading server to wheezy

[Santiago Vila]

Package: samba
Version: 2:3.6.6-3
Severity: serious

After upgrading a printer server from squeeze to wheezy, I could no
longer print from a client already running wheezy using the smb
protocol.

To reproduce this I installed minimal squeeze and wheezy systems under
QEMU/KVM and did the following in both of them:

apt-get install cups cups-pdf samba samba-common-bin
adduser --gecos "B. L. User" --disabled-password bluser
smbpasswd -a bluser      (passwd: abc)

That was the server part.

The client was my wheezy personal computer and it had a printer
pointing to the "PDF" virtual printer using the usual smb mechanism:

DeviceURI smb://bluser:abc@qemu/PDF

This printer was configured as a "Generic PDF printer".

The result:

* It works out of the box if the server is running squeeze.
* It does not work at all if the server is running wheezy.

In both cases the smb.conf file was the default.

By using snapshot.debian.org, I was able to determine that this works:

deb http://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20111128/ sid main contrib
samba 2:3.5.11~dfsg-4  cups-pdf 2.6.1-3  cups 1.5.0-12

and this does not work:

deb http://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20111129/ sid main contrib
samba 2:3.6.1-2  cups-pdf 2.6.1-3  cups 1.5.0-12

[ Note: The samba packages are the ones that changed from 20111128 to 20111129
  and that's the reason why this report is against samba, but of course,
  I could be wrong here ].

Trying to downgrade to samba 2:3.5.11~dfsg-4 didn't work because of
Bug#650541 (kerberos related link error).

Another thing which I tried was to install all the recommends in the server:

apt-get install --fix-policy --install-recommends

but nothing changed.

Then I set "log level = 3" and searched for this error message:

[2012/12/08 16:39:45.167182,  3] rpc_server/spoolss/srv_spoolss_nt.c:1904(_spoolss_OpenPrinterEx)
  access DENIED for printer open

and finally found a fix here:

http://www.df.lth.se/~jokke/samba_printer.php

which is to put this option in smb.conf:

[printers]
  use client driver = yes


It is likely that this fix is not a good fix for everybody and I'm
not even sure that this is a bug in samba, but I really believe that
cups-pdf should work out of the box in wheezy, hence the serious
severity.

Of course, feel free to downgrade or reassign as appropriate.

If this may not be fixed properly I would appreciate that it's
documented in /usr/share/doc/samba/NEWS.Debian.gz or any other
suitable place (like wheezy release notes).

Thanks.