Chapter 11: Installing and Managing Printers

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This chapter covers everything you need to know about printer sharing, one of the most important functions of a network. The chapter starts by discussing how print servers work and how to choose a suitable printer. It then launches into a discussion about installing printers, changing printer driver and print server settings, as well as printer troubleshooting.

Understanding Print Servers

Print servers are computers (or sometimes network appliances) that manage the communications between printers and the client computers generating the print jobs.

Generally, there are two approaches to print servers. The Microsoft approach is to use a Windows computer as an “intelligent” print server that handles communication between the printers and the client computers (reducing strain on the clients), and maintains a common print queue for all clients. Microsoft print servers also make it easy to find printers on the network by name (NetBIOS, DNS, or Active Directory), and install the appropriate printer drivers.

Planning 

Microsoft Windows XP Professional and Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional can be used as print servers; however, they support a maximum of 10 simultaneous users. Additionally, if the shared printer is connected via a USB or parallel interface, the desktop computer acting as a print server can slow to a crawl while clients print, which will have an impact on any user who is logged on locally.

In contrast, other operating systems such as Linux and printers with built-in network interfaces use a relatively “dumb” print server called the Line Printer Daemon (LPD), which acts strictly as an interface between the network and the printer. Each client maintains its own printer queue and performs all pre-print processing, increasing the amount of time the computer is partially or completely unavailable for other tasks.

These two approaches aren’t in opposition to each other and, in fact, the best way to connect a printer to a Windows print server is via a network connection to a printer, which usually runs the LPD service. The Windows print server connects to the printer using the traditional Line Printer Remote (LPR) service (the client-side equivalent of LPD) or via the higher-performance standard TCP/IP printer port, and shares the printer on the network. The Windows print server holds the printer queue and sends each print job to LPD, which passes the job to the printer.

Printer Terminology

Although the term “printer” is usually used to refer to both the physical device and its software interface, strictly speaking, a printer is a device that does the actual printing, and a logical printer is the software interface (printer driver) for the printer. You can have one logical printer associated with a single printer, or you can have several logical printers associated with a single printer. In this second arrangement, the logical printers can be configured at different priority levels so that one logical printer handles normal printing and another handles print jobs that should be printed during off-peak hours. For a printer that supports both PostScript and Printer Control Language (PCL), two logical printers allow users to choose which type of printing to do.

A single logical printer can also be associated with multiple physical printers in a printer pool, as long as all the printers work with the same driver. Printer pools distribute printing load more evenly, increasing performance. Because the physical printers in the pools are interchangeable, printer pools also make it possible for an administrator to add or remove physical printers without affecting the users’ configurations.

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