Re: [TCLUG:508] old 486 as print server

[Dane Johnson <djohnson@anaximander.ml.org>]

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And on Thursday, July 02, Tim Wilson spake thusly:
> I'm going to buy a network printer. I'll probably get an HP 6MP. The
> printer does Postscript, but to make it work with ethernet you need to
> buy HP's JetDirect print server. That's going to add around $200 to an
> $800 printer. To save some money can I set up one of my old 486s to act
> a print server, i.e., connect the 6MP to that machine through the
> parallel port and avoid the JetDirect?
> 
> I'm still trying to get this network printing stuff figured out. Any
> comments would be appreciated.

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!  I used to have just this sort of setup in
my apartment.  Of course, it was just for one person, but I had a 486 33 set
up to be my IP masquerade host, printer server, NFS server, and web server.
Worked great, except I occaisionally had problems with large files making it
run out of memory/swap space or something.

Anyway, the first step is getting the 486 to print in the first place.  Once
you have that working, it's a fairly simple matter to set up lpd,
/etc/hosts.lpd, and the printcap entries on the client machines.

- -- 
 Dane Johnson   -   johns896@tc.umn.edu   -   http://umn.edu/~johns896/
                                          'I was outnumbered.'
                                          'How many of them were there?'
                                          'Three million.'

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