HP All In One Direct Digital Filing and Samba on FreeNAS

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mikeyr

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Sep 19, 2011
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Hi,
Wanted to post a useful tip I just discovered. I have an HP Officejet Pro L7650 All-In-One printer that has a "direct digital filing" feature. A couple of years ago, back in FreeNAS .69 days the digital filing feature worked great with FreeNAS. However, some upgrade along the way made the feature stop working. I've missed the feature and have been trying off-and-on to fix it. The printer simply reports that "It can not connect to the folder, is the remote computer on?" I've tried reading the Samba logs, but they're pretty dense and cryptic. The printer can connect to other Windows machines on the network, so it's not exactly a problem with the printer.

I made a huge discovery today though. If I go into the CIFS setup in FreeNAS and I change the authentication from "anonymous" to "local user"; and then I go into the HP Printer and set up a Direct Digital Filing account with the user name "root" and put in my FreeNAS box root password; then the HP direct digital filing magically works!!

I haven't tried setting up some other users/passwords in FreeNAS to see if I can use something other than root in the printer, but at least I have somethign working now. It appears that somehow HP's firmware doesn't work with Samba's "anonymous" authentication.

I suppose I'll now have to figure out how to get all my machines working with authentication instead of the "easy" anonymous access...

I hope this helps someone having similar issues.
 

mikeyr

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Sep 19, 2011
Messages
20
Update: Bummer, the solution that worked so well at 3am the other night is no longer working. The HP All-In-One now reports that it "it can not connect to the remote computer" even when I have restarted CIFS/Samba in "local user" authentication and have the HP set up with root user and password...
I'm not sure why it worked once the other night-- I am almost wondering if there is some communications timeout set in Samba that is slightly too short... so usually the HP fails to connect but every once in a while it works? I'll have to try to dig out some logs from Samba to see if anyone can help debug.

Does anyone know anything about how the logs work-- I've tried switching between "normal" and "debug" modes in the GUI for logging and the results seem off-- the "normal" mode had as much, if not more information than debugging; but the information was completely different...!

I am looking at the logs in /var/log/samba/log.smbd

How do these logs work? It seems like stuff appears and then disappears again after "a while"... does the log somehow delete older information or have a max size it is allowed to grow to?
 
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