TR Forums

Hello everyone,

I've got a friend with a older parallel printer and he wants it to be networked without having to hook up the parallel cable within his network. I suppose he is thinking about how networked printers are setup at his job. How can he get this printer connected to the network without connecting that old cable? Is this even possible? He wants to be able to print from anywhere on his network. Any ideas, I'm not the best with networking, but my buddy is even worse, lol!

Thanks for any suggestions!

Trellot

Could buy an external print server. It's a doohickey that plugs into the printer via a parallel (or USB for newer models) cable, then plugs into the network via Cat-5.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6833156026

If for some insane reason he's dead-set against seeing the old parallel cable at all, maybe his printer's got internal slots for a print server, like the old Laserjet 4.

If you don't want to use a print server like mentioned above, you can hook the printer to a PC using a Belkin parallel to USB cable and then have the PC act as the print server. The only problem with this arrangement is that the PC will have to be on in order to print to that printer. (BTW, this is how a printer at his workplace probably works. A domain server acts as the print server and is always on, he just doesn't see it.)

If you want a parallel print server, I've got a spare I'll give you for cost of shipping.

bdwilcox wrote:

BTW, this is how a printer at his workplace probably works. A domain server acts as the print server and is always on, he just doesn't see it.

Not necessarily. We stick our printers right onto the network, usually with their internal Ethernet cards but sometimes with external servers.

bthylafh wrote:

bdwilcox wrote:

BTW, this is how a printer at his workplace probably works. A domain server acts as the print server and is always on, he just doesn't see it.

Not necessarily. We stick our printers right onto the network, usually with their internal Ethernet cards but sometimes with external servers.

You have the client PC's communicate directly to the printers? That's kinda scary.

Why shouldn't they? Never had any trouble, and we've got probably a few thousand computers and at least a few hundred printers.

Because then you can't manage the printer queue's or auto driver installation or AD printer browsing.

That just means a little more pain for the desktop-support techs; no big deal.

Our Windows admin doesn't grok those things anyway.

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

If you want a parallel print server, I've got a spare I'll give you for cost of shipping.

Yes, I'm interested.

bthylafh wrote:

Our Windows admin doesn't grok those things anyway.

grok? That's so fetch.