UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I'm about to be leaving when my current contract is, though I would like to be able to do one last thing though.

Ok here's the deal. Everything here is Windows apart from a huge Xerox printer they have which running of Unix The other IT blokes here (Windows people) have told the blokes in the print room that they can't connect the Xerox printer to the Windows servers.

I just found this out. I said it was not the case.

What they would like the printer to do is be setup so they can scan documents from the printer to a e-mail address (in PDF).

I said Samba could do the job they want. I've never really installed Samba or played to much with it (It's always already been done when I get there ). But would I be correct in saying that if we setup Samba on the print server (Windows) then the printer would be able to connect and scan documents etc?

I'm not sure if I would need to do anything on the printer. though I think if I setup Samba on Windows then I should have to do and confiure setups on the printer. Only configure it so it can do the job.

So anything with what I said correct? Don't ask what model Xerox printer it is all I know is it's like 12feet long and cost a hell of alot of $$$ Oh yeah and even Xerox people who have come out sofar can't help them. I'm the first person who told them it can be done. I'm just wondering if what I think is the right way of going about doing it

thanks in advance for your help.

Oh yeah forgot to add. They can print to the printer though not scan from the printer to a computer

Please do not suggest installing a Unix let alone a Linux machine on the network. The people here would not have it and don't know how to use it. I'm leaving in under a week so I can't look after it for them.

I know I didn't need to do a new post but I didn't want to delete the older posts so this one makes sense.

The bloke who run the printroom showed me I can reach a shell Whole different ball and game now I don't need to know what I did before like what the printer can do what services it runs, how it can connect to the network eitehr network card does it have a serial card and the list of questions goes on.

So anyway this is what I was able to find out. This printer is running a compelete version of Solaris 8 running on SPARC (yes this is a printer) also it has Samaba installed

So all I have to do now is make it so Samba runs. I'm going to try tomorrow making it sop Samba runs as a deamon using,

smbd -D

Then I will try and mount the path on a windows machine. Then when that is done the blokes will be able to scan on the printer then put the scanned job into a directory path I choose for them. Then they go to the mount directory with Windows so they can then e-mail them off to the people they need to.

Running the smbd -D command will do run the samba thingy for me to be able to test what I am after? If not any other idea's on what i could try?

I will let you all know how this goes.

Wells ince I've posted a question and foudn the answer since and added a bit more to it I though I might as well finish the post to

Well after all my work and looing at how the Samba config was done by Xerox it doesn't look like I will have a win before I leave here Looks like they will be doing some weird strange setup using FTP for the users to do it. So the user will scan to a directory, then ftp that to a computer then delete the file from the printer.

Yeah I know it sounds like a heap of work that shouldn't be done. I told my boss that and also that Samba would be the better and easy way to do it. They worried that when it fails how will they fix it as they are Windows people here not Unix at all! I tried to also tell them it's not like Windows software very very rarely just goes wrong in Unix.

I tried to educate some people of a different new and even better way to do it but seems like I've failed Doesn't matter not my loose it's their's.

I'm still waiting to see if I'll be attending the meeting I setup. They want to only send the network admin down to it though (windows admin) and they don't want someone there with Unix exp. I'm the only one in the company with Unix exp.

So it's true what they say. People really are scared of what they know nothing about and are to scared to imbrace a change