Cable/ADSL routers with print spooler

[lists at prwdot.org (Peter R. Wood)]

Drew,

> But I take it that since this is a Linux list you successfully have
> Linux clients printing to the print server? I assume that is the "Unix
> LPR" support? And would this work with Mac OS X (perhaps via the
> gimp-print package)?

I have not tested on Linux machines, but I have tested on Mac OS X. The
procedure should be fairly similar if your Linux machine is using the
CUPS printing package, since that is what Mac OS X uses as its built-in
printing system. To set up Mac OS X for use with a printer attached to
the SMC Barricade, try using CUPS's built-in web interface. It should be
fairly similar to creating a new printer entry, with a few specifics:

1) For device, choose LPD/LPR Printer or Host
2) For device URI, enter lpd://ip.of.the.router/lpt1
3) For "Make", choose the manufacturer of your printer
4) For "Model", choose your printer's model
--note-- 3 and 4 may present a problem if you printer is not supported by
the default CUPS drivers. If you can find drivers for your printer, you
will want to download gimp-print to get a fairly large set of drivers.

After this is done, you should have a fully functional printer device that
can print to the SMC router's print server.

As I said, there is a bug in some models of the SMC router that cause it
to print out two extra pages with each job, when printing from a UNIXy
system like CUPS... annoying if you are printing out short documents, but
not a show stopper. One of the pages is just blank so you can re-use it.
SMC is aware of the bug internally, and there are some beta firmware
patches floating around to fix it on certain models, but it doesn't seem
that a universal fix will be ready any time soon. For now I am just
putting up with it.

Peter