Hello, Thank you for your reply. Now my next question: What is better choice to connect my three printers to networking printer server? Should I do this over electronic automatic LPT1/2/3 switch connected to original LPT0 port on printer server? Or I should buy three parport ISA cards and connect each printer to one of
----- Original Message -----
From: Alexander Daniloff
I want to be able to print on these three printers independently and simultaneously if possible.
Any suggestion are gladly appreciated. Thanks, Alex
It depends, can you get a electronic automatic switch that works under Linux? One that is OS indepent, or that includes drivers for Linux? I have never used a automatic switch before, so I can't really give any advice on this. See if it will do what you want, maybe email the company that is sale-ing these devices and see if they can give you some usefully information about them. three parport ISA cards (probably only need 2, if the motherboard has a built in parport (most do)). I have installed 2 par ports on a system before, but never three. The downfall to this, is that it will be a resource nightmare try to get the parport from conflicting with each other. Make sure you have a good hardware book and some time, before you even consider trying this. The good thing to this, is you /should/ be able to print to all ports at the same time. Each parport is going to need an IRQ and IO address (including the one on your motherboard). So if you do go this way, make sure they are highly configurable. Make sure they give you allot of choices on which IRQ and IO addresses you want to use with that card. Then check you system and make sure that you have enough free IRQ and IO addresses for these cards before you even buy them. If you do decide to go with LP cards, make sure they are just the LP cards and nothing else. There is some that include serial/IDE interfaces. These also can take up resources in the machine (if they can't be disabled) and will probably increase the price of the card. I have seen ISA cards with 2 parports on the back and nothing else, if you have 1 onboard, this might be another option, save some ISA slots for something else. It is your time and your money, so I don't want to tell you what do to. But personally, for my home network (assuming I had a printer, let alone 3! : ) I would probably go with the LP-on-a-card method. Jack
You can get cheap parport ISA cards for about $5 a pop, make sure they
a wide range of resources that you can jumper on them. (ie. make sure you can change which LP, IRQ and IO it uses though jumpers on the board, and make sure those resources are avaiable in the system you are installing
have them
in, or you will get a massive conflict resource headache). There is switches out there, but most of the ones I have seen have to be 'flipped' by hand, manually, so you could only print to one printer at a time.
Jack
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