Dotan Cohen wrote:
On 01/12/2007, Fred Erickson <frederickson@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Thu, 2007-11-29 at 14:16 +0200, Dotan Cohen wrote:
Hi all, this is not a Fedora question, but I am abusing the list's
collective knowledge :)
Our home network has two Fedora machines and a Ubuntu machine on a
four-port router. As none of the machines are 'always on' machines,
the poor USB printer is plugged into whichever one needs to print. I
recently saw a device for connecting a serial printer to an ethernet
port on the router, thereby giving the printer a local IP address and
any connected computer could print to it. With NAT, even a remote
computer could print to such a printer (actually a feature that we
would use a lot in our home, as I am often at the university and I
send documents home for the wife to print).
Does anyone know of a similar product for USB printers? I've scoured
Ebay but found nothing. I'd love to hear of anyone who has experience
with such devices, and who could describe possible drawbacks that I
have not considered.
Thanks in advance.
Dotan Cohen
Here is a link to the print server I have been using for a couple of
years -- seems to work very well. I have had to re-set it one time I
believe. Think it cost $30 or so on sale at CompUSA.
Thanks. Now that I have the keywords I found several models on Ebay.
They all come with a driver CD for Windows. Is this necessary? Can
Linux be configured to work without the disk? Note that my HP
Officejet 4200 works fine in KDE as KDE comes with the drivers
installed for it already, but a friend's Lexmark E120 does _not_ work
in KDE because there are no Linux drivers for it. What is the driver
situation for these print servers?
Thanks.
Dotan Cohen
Yesterday I set up a D-link DP-301U "Fast Ethernet Print Server" that my
daughter brought home from school, brand new in the box, it had been
sold as surplus!
There's really not much to do, access it with your browser and configure
it to fit your LAN. This one is USB printer to Ethernet and I have it
plugged into an Ethernet switch that feeds into our wireless LAN.
Configuration probably would have been faster had I used a Windows
computer and the provided CDROM but I don't do things that way. Had to
create a network address to satisfy the device and once I did that I was
able to access it with Dillo and change the address to the 192.168.1.4
that I wanted after which Firefox displayed the built in setup menu, etc.
It is presently driving an old Epson C62 printer. Only thing I noticed
is that it is shown to be USB1, not sure how much that affects the
printer? It doesn't seem as fast as the HP6840 I usually use but that
may be the printer itself.
Bob Goodwin
