Chapter 5: Printer Sharing between Windows and Linux

Overview

Ah, printers. They're the enterprise's necessary evil. They consume paper, toner, time, and patience. And oftentimes our enterprises have a lot of printers. Maybe it would be better if we had fewer? Or, if not fewer, we could at least get more people printing on the printers we do have.

That's what this chapter is about. That is, you can leverage your existing Linux or Windows printer investment and share it.

Then the fun begins.

As with previous chapters, we'll ensure things are set up and working first by making our Windows clients talk to printers on Windows servers and our Linux clients talk to printers on Linux servers. In Figure 5.1, you can see our intended design. That is, we want to have a Windows 2003 server host a printer and also have our Linux server host a printer. Then, we want to have our Windows and Linux clients be able to print to whichever printer we want.

Figure 5.1: We will be setting up our Linux Samba server and our Windows 2003 server to share printers and have our Windows and Linux clients print to them.