Background

This technique requires that you already have both Samba & CUPS servers setup and configured. You should also already have the printer whose drivers we’re going to install configured and working through CUPS. You can read how I did this for the MFC-8480DN printer in this previous post.

Getting Started

First things first, you typically want to grab a copy of the Windows drivers for your particular printer. Remember, in this example I’m using the network capable, Brother MFC-8480DN, that I discussed in this previous post. I downloaded the Windows drivers from the Brother’s website here. Here’s a link the specific driver bundle that I used. Brother calls this bundle the “Add Printer Wizard Driver”. I then set them aside, so I could focus on getting the special Samba share, print$, configured. This is a special share where print drivers for all versions of Windows can be staged, for later consumption by Windows client systems that add this printer.

Samba

adding the print$ share

For my setup, which is a CentOS 5 system, I added the following stanza to my /etc/samba/smb.conf file.

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# /etc/samba/smb.conf
 
[print$]
  comment = Printer Driver Download Area
  path = /etc/samba/drivers
  browseable = yes
  guest ok = yes
  read only = yes
  write list = @samba-printers, root

NOTE: The unpacked driver files that get added to the print$ share will be stored under /etc/samba/drivers on the Samba server. You can put them really anywhere, but I chose to keep them with the Samba config. files.

samba-printers Linux Group

Next, I created a special Linux group that I arbitrarily called samba-printers. Users in this group, in addition to root, will be the only users that have permission to add Windows drivers to the print$ Samba share. I accomplished this by adding the line below to the /etc/group file on the Samba server.

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# /etc/group file on Samba server
 
samba-printers:x:1020:root,user1,user2

The 2 user accounts, user1 & user2, are both Linux accounts as well as Windows accounts. In my home network I typically create them this way to make things like this simpler. If you happen to user different user accounts on Windows vs. Linux you can map the Windows accounts to Linux accounts through the Samba config. file /etc/samba/smbusers.

creating /etc/samba/drivers

Next, I created the directory /etc/samba/drivers and permissioned it with our newly created Linux group using these commands:

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mkdir -m ug+rwx,o-w,g+s /etc/samba/drivers
chgrp samba-printers /etc/samba/drivers

restarting Samba

Finally I needed to restart the Samba server.

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/etc/init.d/smbd restart

Installing a Print Driver to print$

uncompressing drivers

Now I turned my attention back to that driver bundle I downloaded previously. BTW, the file I downloaded in that step was called 8480-USB2KXPVISTA-32-A-US.EXE. On one of my Windows PC’s I created a directory called c:\mfc-8480dn. I then uncompressed the 8480-USB2KXPVISTA-32-A-US.EXE file into this directory.

installing the CUPS printer

Still on the Windows PC: I brought up the Windows Run dialog box by selecting the Start Menu –> Run…. In the Run dialog I typed \\bart\mfc-8480dn. This then took me through the process of adding the CUPS managed MFC-8480DN printer to my system. Once I added this printer to my Windows PC’s I brought up the properties dialog for this printer. You can typically find these icons under the Window’s Control Panel under something called Printers in Windows 2000 or Printers and Faxes in Windows XP. Here’s a screenshot of my Printers folder on my Windows 2000 box.

printers

Copying the files to print$

To start this process I first right clicked on the newly added printer, MFC-8480DN on bart, and selected Properties. I was then presented with the Properties dialog box. From here I selected the Advanced tab towards the top, and then clicked the New Driver… button.

New Driver

This began the Add Print Driver Wizard as seen in the screenshot below. I then clicked the Next button.

wizard

From here I clicked the Have Disk… button as in this screenshot.

Have Disk

In the Install From Disk dialog I selected the Browse button.

browse

In the Locate File dialog, I browsed to the location where I uncompressed the driver files, i.e. C:\mfc-8480dn\usa, and clicked the Open button.

inf file

I was then returned to the Add Printer Driver Wizard dialog and presented with a potential list of printers to choose from. Here I chose the MFC-8480DN Printer, and clicked the Next button.

select printer

You should now be back at the Install From Disk dialog window. The location of your drivers, C:\mfc-8480dn\usa in my case, was displayed in the Copy manufacturer’s files from: field. I then clicked the OK button.

Install driver

Finally I was at the end of the Add Printer Driver Wizard. I clicked the Finish button which began installing the drivers to the print$ Samba share.

Copy files

If everything was setup correctly, you should now see the contents of the directory C:\mfc-8480dn\usa being copied to the Samba server, i.e. \\bar\print$\….

transfer dialog

verify the drivers are on print$

checking from windows

To double check that the files were correctly installed, you can login to the Samba server and do an ls to see that the files were in fact copied to print$. Simply look around in the /etc/samba/drivers directory.

Additionally you can see what print drivers are available for a given printer by bringing up a printer’s Properties dialog, and selecting the Sharing tab. Once you’ve got the Sharing tab open, click on the Additional Drivers… button.

additional drivers

In the Additional Drivers dialog box, you’ll see the word Yes next to each platform that has a driver available for this particular printer, on the print$ share. The check mark denotes which driver you’re printer is using.

drivers available per platform

checking from linux

If you have the package samba-client under CentOS/RHEL/Fedora installed you should see a program available called rpcclient. You can use this program to query a samba server to get a list of available drivers.

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# rpcclient <samba server> -U root -c "enumdrivers"
 
% rpcclient bart -U root -c "enumdrivers"
 
[Windows NT x86]
Printer Driver Info 1:
	Driver Name: [Brother MFC-8480DN Printer]

About a month ago I purchased a MFC aka. an AIO printer/scanner/copier/fax device which was networkable via ethernet. I chose the Brother MFC-8480DN and I’ve been very pleased with it. It replaced another Brother laser printer, a HL-1440 which I never had a single problem with; but our aging SCSI (yes a SCSI) HP scanner had recently given up the ghost. Rather than buy another single purpose scanner, I thought I could consolidate some space in our home office by buying an All-in-One device.

I’ve been extremely satisfied with our choice, except for the lack of drivers available for scanning under Linux. I wasn’t really overly concerned given this particular device was just released as a new product in Q1/2009. My previous Brother printer, which I had since 2002, was supported under Linux from day 1 and looking at the Brother website, pretty much all of their products are too.

Just to be on the safe side I decided to contact customer support just to see if one of the existing devices could be substituted in for my model number. I quickly received an email in which the customer rep. said it wasn’t currently available, but to check back at their website in about 1-2 months and it would be. So I did tonight (June/2009) and was pleasantly surprised to find that indeed, new drivers were available for my device. So I downloaded the new drivers and installed them into one of my OpenVZ VEs as follows.

Before I get started I just wanted to mention that I’ve really grown to liking OpenVZ and have pretty much converted most of my SOHO infrastructure to using it. It really gives me tremendous flexibility in quickly creating containered instances of OSes so that I can play around with things without trashing any of my existing systems.

Getting Started

For this particular setup I already had a devoted instance of OpenVZ just for CUPS, so I opted to use this VE to setup both the printing and scanning capabilities. NOTE: In this howto, I’m only going to focus on what Brother calls Scanning to a file.

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# requires sane backend
yum install sane-backends
 
# install the brother drivers
rpm -ivh --nodeps brscan3-0.2.6-1.i386.rpm
 
# configure the scanner
brsaneconfig3 -a name=mfc8480dn model=MFC-8480DN ip=192.168.1.14
 
# setup the server daemon (scans to a file)
brscan-skey-0.2.1-3.i386.rpm

Scanning to a File

This is where there is a small server daemon (brscan-skey), which is able to talk to the scanner, and receive scanned files as either JPG or PNG files (I think it supports other formats too). You can launch it like this:

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# brscan-skey's usage
#
% brscan-skey -h
USAGE: brscan-skey [option]
This tool enables you to scan a document by using the
Scan key on the Brother MFC through the network.
 
 no option     :register all network MFCs
 -t            :terminate this tool
 -p PASSWD     :set the password
 -u USERNAME   :set the user name
 --diagnosis   :print diagnosis data 
 -h            :help
 
# Here I am starting up the server daemon!
#
% brscan-skey

NOTE: Eventually I’ll want to throw together a start/stop script for brscan-skey and incorporate it into this VE as a full fledged service. For now, every time this system reboots I’ll have to manually start it!

Walkthrough

These files are then stored on the system that is running brscan-skey. When this is working I can basically walk up to the MFC-8480DN, stick a piece of paper on the glass, press the scan button, and have the JPG/PNG file get automatically dumped to my server.

• Initial screen on MFC-8480DN LCD after pressing the Scan button

initial LCD

• Next screen on MFC-8480DN LCD, asking which method to use for scanned output

screenshot of selecting where to send a scan

• Final screen asking which system on the network to direct the scanned file to

screenshot of which computer to save the scan to

brscan-skey Output

The daemon brscan-skey will put the files into a directory like so:

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# console chatter from brscan-skey
scan from mfc8480dn(brother3:net1;dev0) to /root/brscan/brscan.Pj8088
scanimage: rounded value of br-x from 215.9 to 215.88
scanimage: rounded value of br-y from 355.6 to 355.567

Windows vs. Linux Differences

Notice that the files are getting dumped into the directory /root/brscan/. This is because I started brscan-skey as root. Also this is why in the 3rd screenshot, the choice is root. The other 2 choices in this screenshot are windows PCs whose names are mrx and scully. This is one minor difference between the PC version of this software and the Linux version. Not a huge difference but something to consider. Eventually I will go through the Brother scripts located under /usr/local/Brother, to see if I can change/override the name that is being passed to the scanner, but I’m going to leave that for another day.

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# ...here...
% ls /usr/local/Brother/
cupswrapper  fax  filter  inf  lpd  sane
# ...and here...
% ls /usr/local/Brother/sane/
Brsane3.ini           brscan_mail.config      brscan-skey-0.2.1-3.cfg  setupSaneScan3
brsaneconfig3         brscan_mailmessage.txt  brscan-skey-0.2.1-3.sh
brsanenetdevice3.cfg  brscan-skey-0.2.1-3     script

Printing

Now given the MFC-8480DN is just a standard laser printer I was able to find a suitable driver that allowed me to initially do basic printing from CUPS, so I didn’t bother waiting for the true native CUPS driver to be released from Brother.

Once a native driver did become available I took the opportunity to install it as well. First off I needed to install some RPMs.

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# CUPS wrappers
rpm -ihv --nodeps cupswrapperMFC8480DN-2.0.3-1.i386.rpm
 
# mfc8480dn driver
rpm -ivh --nodeps mfc8480dnlpr-2.0.3-1.i386.rpm

CUPS

Once these were installed I went through the web interface of CUPS, and modified my existing printer setup to use these new drivers. The interface is usually located at port 631 of the CUPS server.

Here are some screenshots of how I went about re-configuring the MFC-8480DN printer in CUPS.

• Initial screen in CUPS’ web interface, showing the existing printer

select printer model (driver)

• Next screen after clicking “modify printer”

MFC-8480DN's location & description

• Select the IPP Protocol for communication between cups and the printer

select which protocol to use to communicate with networked printer

• Specify the device URI

device URI

• Select the Maker

select printer make/manufacturer

• Select the Model

select printer model (driver)

Click the modify button and you’re all set. The final piece to all this is setting up the fax. But this is already a really long post, so I’m going to leave that for another day too.

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% lpq
lpq: error - no default destination available.

It usually takes a couple of minutes to remember/figure out what I’m doing wrong here. Then it dawns on me that I need to modify the client.conf file. In order to get a client machine running CUPS to know about a print server I have to modify its client.conf file.

Add this to the file, /etc/cups/client.conf which is usually empty to start:

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ServerName print.bubba.net

Restart cups and you should be all set.

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/etc/init.d/cups reload