So as part of the new floor, I rearranged my office downstairs to separate the desks and create two zones: a "Windows" zone and a "Linux" zone (yes, I'm a geek. you should know that by now). As part of the rezoning, our printer - an old HP Laserjet 4 - was reassigned to the Linux box (as it turns out, two 17" monitors AND a collossal printer is just too much when placed on the same desk).

And thus my descent into figuring out how to share a printer to Windows workstations began. I thought I'd had it figured out the first time; I had already set up Samba to make /var/www accessible to my Windows box, but I'd forgotten that I'd also set up a username and password to do so. Since my computer automatically logs in and maps the drive, it wasn't a big deal to also map the printer on my machine. It was when I tried to do the same on Kirsten's laptop that I realized it wasn't going to work so well.

So last night I tried to create a public printer share, which should have been easier than it was. In the end, I managed to completely lock myself out of ALL shares on the server, regardless of whether I logged in or not. At one point I could browse, access, and connect to the printer, but all print jobs sent to it from the Windows computers went into a deep, dark void.

It wasn't until this morning, when I completely blew away the samba and CUPS configurations and started again that it finally started working again. It also turns out that Samba isn't all that happy going across workgroups (moneyfrog, Kirsten's laptop, was set up to use WORKGROUP, whereas the devbox, the Linux server, and luckyfrog, my desktop, were set up to use MSHOME). Fortunately, when I left this morning, the printer worked and was accessible to all.