On 5/13/2010 5:01 PM, John Andersen wrote:
On 5/13/2010 3:02 AM, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
On Wed, 2010-05-12 at 18:56 -0700, John Andersen wrote:
On 5/9/2010 7:48 PM, Brian K. White wrote:
On 5/9/2010 9:48 PM, Jay C Vollmer wrote:
On Sunday 09 May 2010 19:59:38 Carlos E. R. wrote:
On Sunday, 2010-05-09 at 19:54 -0500, Jay C Vollmer wrote:
> I'd love to be able to share a single USB printer between a couple of > Linux boxes without having to run a full CUPS printserver. > print server by using a live-cd version that boots from a usb stick into ram instead of a normal install so no matter what you can always just reboot to fix any problem. Personally, if it was for work and I needed it to always work, I'd get the hp.
There are a LOT more solutions than Jet Direct... Look here. http://tinyurl.com/2828vuv
Nobody said their where not a LOT more solutions; but the question was for *reliable* solutions. Of which there are few, and a Google search won't help you identify those. The great majority of these type of devices are "flaky" [and that description is kind].
You've tested the majority of them then?
I use three different brands of these sort of things with no problem. Netgear, Linksys and Trendnet.
CUPS is happy to use them as a backend as long as it can see them, and because most of them emulate JetDirect, as well as Windows shared printer, you can always find a way to make them work
I have tested many, over the course of many years, and as I said, no all suck. It more or less impossible to predict what will be a good one, or in what specific way a bad one will be bad, and usually it takes a long time to discover that a bad one is bad the hard way. A site might operate for a year without a problem because just by luck: They were fine until they happened to send a job larger than N bytes. Or they were fine until they swapped out the original printer with some other printer, where the printer is fine plugged into a pc but for whatever reason is no good on that print server. Or they were fine as long as there was only one host (the unix box) sending jobs but as soon as some desktop started also sending jobs directly it locks up or fails in some other way. Or they were fine until the lan was very busy an laggy one day and the device turns out to choke on misordered or dropped or fragmented packets. Or they were fine until I got an hour away from them down the road after installing. Or they were fine until the unit got hot. Or they were fine when some windows box was sending jobs via SMB, but it fails to do LPD reliably. Or it ONLY does lpd reliably and fails to do raw tcp (jetdirect) reliably. Or they are fine until a windows desktop sends some printer control code to the printer putting it into some funky state such that it no longer works from the print sever. Or they are fine until the first time the multifunction tries to do anything other than print. Or they are fine exceept the print server is very sensitive to static or other power imperfections. Or they are fine except there is no good way to configure the device other than using the proprietary util that came with the unit on a cd that only works on windows (you can set up a jetdirect completely from scratch, completely remotely from the *ix server, just by having the on-site user plug it in to the wall and read you the MAC address from the sticker over the phone. No one on-site has to have the slightest clue about setting it up the normal way. No special windows util, not even web browser. You the admin can do it all from the server by arp, ping, & telnet. no dhcp or anything needed, the user doesn't even have to print the setup sheet and read you an ip address from it.) Or they are fine but the print server is not an external usb model the OP asked for but is built-in to a large office machine or an industrial dot-matrix. Or they are fine but the print server is parallel not usb. Or they are fine but sloooooow. ....ad nauseum. The question that was asked, and answered was, can I skip all that "probably ok" stuff and is there something that is known solid? The box claims it will work, someone printed 10 sheets ok once, someone else has one in their home office and print 3 sheets a day for the last year with no problem... none of that qualifies as tested and known solid. -- bkw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org