Hi:
I have a HP Laserjet 1200 series printer plugged into the parallel port
of one of the two Linux boxes on my home LAN. But the two Linux boxes
also run VMware with Win98 or Win2k guests.
The Linux box with no printer can print fine to the Linux box with
printer. But the VMware guests cannot print via the network. The
VMware machines both have host-only networking and bridged networking
configured and operating normally.
So far I have only been unable to print from the VMware guest on the
Linux box with the physical printer connection, using the direct
parallel port connection.
This is a pain in the butt because I have to
#modprobe -r lp
before running the VM to free the parallel port, and after that no
Linuxes can talk to the printer. I am no Samba expert, so haven't tried
more serious attempts at configuring the VMware host-only Samba server
to share the printer or running another Samba server over the bridged
networking. Experience with a similar situation at work and from
reading the VMware newsgroups suggest it can't be made to work, or only
experts can pull it off.
I am thinking the easiest thing to do would be to put the printer on the
LAN instead of the parallel port. This could turn out to be best also
because I may want to use the parallel port for some embedded
microprocessor development that requires the physical port.
I am thinking about purchasing the "HP Jetdirect 170x external print
server for Ethernet 10Base-T networks" for the tolerable price of $130.
Can I expect this to work easily in my Linux LAN environment? I have
experience with a direct-to-TCP-port printing setup at work, where it
works as easy as pie, and I can telnet to the printer to tinker with its
settings. This Jetdirect server says it runs a webserver for config via
web browser, but also there is some software which I presume only runs
on Winblows.
I hope I don't need the software and the configuration can be
accomplished only with the web browser on the Linux boxes.
Any experiences with this sort of thing, and/or this model of Jetdirect?
Thanks for input.
Good day!
--
_____________________
Christopher R. Carlen
crobc@earthlink.net
Suse 8.1 Linux 2.4.19