[NCSA-discuss] cautionary tail about installing a network printer on windows

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

If you know a bit about windows or if you know how to 
install a network printer on windows, you can skip to this 
posting.

I have just installed a used network printer for my home 
windows boxes. I bought a network printer as the current 
parallel printer requires that the box the printer is 
connected to is up just to print. With a netowrk printer I 
could print from which ever box was up. Windows has a 
"network printer" option in control panel/printers (which 
I'd used to allow windows boxes to print to the parallel 
printer on another windows box) and I thought I was home and 
hosed.

It turns out that the windows network printer is not a 
network printer at all but a netbios printer, although it 
took me most of last night to realise this.

My new network printer was sitting there on the network 
listening on port 515 and none of the windows boxes could 
find it, although they could see the shared "network 
printer" attached to the parallel port on the windows box. 
Eventually I found that the box sharing the printer wasn't 
listening on port 515, but only had the netbios ports open, 
and realised that windows and I had different ideas about 
network printers. After much futile probing on the HP site 
("jetdirect", "client", "admin") and downloading a bunch of 
worthless programs from the "web jet admin" family, I found 
a posting through google, telling me that the program I want 
is called "Install Network Printer Wizard" (INPW).

This wonder from HP

o installs in the "Programs" tree of another user (not the 
one you're doing the install as), so after the install, you 
don't see it in "Programs" (happened with 3 windows 
machines, w2k and wxp).

o can only find the printer by IP. I have the printer doing 
dhcp (so I can move it from one network to another without 
reconfiguring it). Even though INPW knows the MAC address 
and the name of the printer, you don't get the option of 
specifying the printer by the DNS/netbios name or MAC 
address, only the IP. HP hasn't heard of DHCP.

The jetdirect card in the printer is itself a wonder.

o telnet is the simplest interface. However setting the 
hostname (UC only, no lc chars allowed) doesn't stick. The 
hostname reverts to the IP next time you view it.

o there is an interface on port 80. This requires java and 
an enormous amount of CPU on the client. The latest 
firefox/java/linux doesn't display the pages, you need 
IE/windows. Even when you get to IE, after changing the 
entries, and hitting APPLY, none of the entries change. So 
you're back to telnet, which at least works (except for 
setting the hostname).

Postings on the internet say to download the latest firmware 
for the jetdirect card to fix these problems (it's well 
known that jet direct cards have a hard time remembering 
their hostname). However if HP released code like this after 
all the years they've been making jetdirect cards, I'm not 
hopeful that the problems have been fixed in firmware 
updates.

Joe

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!