Chapter 7. Printing Services

7. Printing Services

Modern printers historically fell into two categories: inexpensive local printers that require a host computer, and more expensive standalone shared network printers. For many, sharing fewer high-end printers was a better solution than using individual inexpensive printers. Although they're more expensive, shared network printers are often economically more efficient from a cost-per-page standpoint and are usually technically superior as well, yielding faster and better prints.

But even inexpensive printers can be networked via a number of methods, like inexpensive wireless print servers. So, in small or home businesses without shared printers, people are starting to network printers and running into the same sorts of problems that corporate shared printers have: When shared-printer demand increases beyond the capacity of the printer, resource contention among your users may cause problems. So many administrators use print servers that monitor and manage printer traffic printer resources.

Mac OS X Server can be configured to provide this service. Essentially, your server acts as a traffic cop between your users and the printers. Print jobs are sent to your server, where they're placed in a queue; then, depending on the information in the job, the user, the printer status, and so forth, they're sent to the printer, put on hold, or denied. As the server administrator, you configure how the server handles print jobs. You can manually adjust print jobs, or you can define user print quotas that instruct the server to automatically disable a user's ability to print after their allowance is used up.

The print server also lets you share non-network printers (like small USB laser and inkjet printers), and re-share network printers using different printing protocols than the printers natively support. Specifically, you can create and share a print queue for any printer that Mac OS X can print to. This includes both raster and PostScript printers available to your server via AppleTalk, Windows (SMB), LPR, IPP, HTTP, Bonjour, Bluetooth, USB, and FireWire. Further, Mac OS X Server can share any of its printer queues via IPP, AppleTalk, Windows (SMB), and LPR (with Bonjour) network printing protocols.