[Wylug-discuss] Printing on WinXP is Hard.

[Dan Walker]

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This is a rant.

Alright, so CUPS is rubbish. The UI is poor, installing drivers is
non-intuitive, and it doesn't really work much better than LPR.

But, OTOH, it does work.

I have spent much of an evening with a Samsung ML-4500 printer, a Linux
box, an OpenBSD firewall, a WinXP box, and a borrowed IOPrint+jr print
server.

Now some background. I bought the Samsung for its Linux support. It
works fairly well, with some limitations which are due to the fact that
it's cheap and nasty. My network consists of my Linux box, my flatmates
OSX box, both behind an OpenBSD firewall, and my other two flatmates'
WinXP plague carriers outside the OpenBSD firewall but behind a Conexant
ADSL router/firewall thingy.

Problem: I'd like my flatmates to be able to print to my printer w/o my
machine being on.

Solution: borrow a IPprint+jr print server - old, but servicable - from
work.

So, I spent a couple of hours (as you do) hard-coding the MAC address
into arp tables so I could configure the IOprint, and making a stupid
mistake trying to punch a suitable port-redirect hole in my firewall.
Eventually got that sorted.

telnet firewall 515

from WinXP worked - straight to IOPrint. So far so good.

So, tried to install the printer.

Apparantely the WinXP drivers for the Samsung are a bit funny anyway,
but the best bit was when I told Windows I wanted a new Printer Port,
and I wanted it to be an LPD one. Well, it tried its best to ID the
print server, but gave up (understandable - it's behind a firewall) and
allowed me to configure it by hand.

And so I told the downloaded driver to print to the new port, and
clicked 'Print Test Page'.

Which crashed the IOprint, to the extent that it wouldn't respond to
pings anymore. I had to hard reset the poor little chap. Worked fine
from Linux afterwards. Printed another test page, and bye-bye. Brilliant.

Honestly. I wasn't expecting that bit to be hard....

Dan

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