The Starport vs. the Borg
2005-07-21 07:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mdlbearHaving given up on Windows file and printer sharing, I decided to switch to the good old Unix LPR protocol. Wednesday, with a house full of geeks, seemed like a good night for it. I was partially successful.
At the moment I have two printers, the new laser printer (attached to a Linux box on the parallel interface, queue name lp), and the Epson R200 (attached to a dual-boot box via USB). I need to move the Epson to a print server, now that dual-boot boxes have two IP addresses. I have a little Airlink+ print server that I bought a couple of weeks ago at Fry's for $20.
Windows XP is supposed to know about LPR, but Win98 doesn't; it requires a third-party driver. AHA, says I to myself; there's one on the print server's driver disk. I installed it, followed the instructions, rebooted a couple of times, installed the laser printer's driver, and it worked. Whee!
Now I know that I'm on the right track, and that LPR printing works even with my wacko network setup. Next step was to try it on the new XP machine.
Confusingly, in order to set up an LPR printer on XP, you have to set it up as a local printer, not a network printer -- apparently "network printer" is MicroSpeak for "Microsoft network printer". The network information for this "local" printer goes into what they call a "port" (like a parallel or USB port). The whole thing requires three wizards. I do not want to know what the designers were thinking. I tried it several times, and it still doesn't work. Am I surprised? No. I even tried disabling the Windows "firewall", without apparent success, but some pages Google found suggest that they do block outgoing LPR connections, so I'll try making an exception next.
Starport 1, Borg 1.
At the moment I have two printers, the new laser printer (attached to a Linux box on the parallel interface, queue name lp), and the Epson R200 (attached to a dual-boot box via USB). I need to move the Epson to a print server, now that dual-boot boxes have two IP addresses. I have a little Airlink+ print server that I bought a couple of weeks ago at Fry's for $20.
Windows XP is supposed to know about LPR, but Win98 doesn't; it requires a third-party driver. AHA, says I to myself; there's one on the print server's driver disk. I installed it, followed the instructions, rebooted a couple of times, installed the laser printer's driver, and it worked. Whee!
Now I know that I'm on the right track, and that LPR printing works even with my wacko network setup. Next step was to try it on the new XP machine.
Confusingly, in order to set up an LPR printer on XP, you have to set it up as a local printer, not a network printer -- apparently "network printer" is MicroSpeak for "Microsoft network printer". The network information for this "local" printer goes into what they call a "port" (like a parallel or USB port). The whole thing requires three wizards. I do not want to know what the designers were thinking. I tried it several times, and it still doesn't work. Am I surprised? No. I even tried disabling the Windows "firewall", without apparent success, but some pages Google found suggest that they do block outgoing LPR connections, so I'll try making an exception next.
Starport 1, Borg 1.
