At the college where I work, there already exists a wireless network. I'd like to get a printer in one lab room that will talk to several computers hooked to laboratory instrumentation. The proposed way our computer guys want to do this is to install a wired drop to a single printer, then as students sign on to the network, this printer can become available. Fine, but if there is a print queue problem, we have to call computer services to kill the queue, which chews up lab time, as they have to finish some other thngs and then get around to doing it. And, if this one printer fails, well, that's it until the repair ticket gets acted upon.. Now at home I have "wireless print servers"--little boxes--that accept a USB connection to the printer, and find my home network and print just fine. If I screw up the print queue (100 instead of 1 copy), I can cancel it from the computer accessing the wireless print server, and don't have to wait for a technician down at Time-Warner cable to kill the job. Also, if the one printer stops working, I can take an older, spare printer, and with the software installed on the computer, just swap printers by merely unplgging the non-working one, and plugging in the working one into the USB port on wireless print server box. I'm going to have to talk to our IT guys about this, and I'm just trying to get some information about these concerns. For instance, the print server boxes I have work on the 192.168.x.x network, but can they be assigned to work in an already-established wireless network outside those addresses? Any help would be appreciated.
Where is this printer connected? It kinda looks like it's attached to a computah or server, to which you don't have access.
Any particular make and model printer?
Ok, so the IT guys setup a server based print spooler. Great idea if you're doing lots of printing. The job is spooled on the server, not on your client machine or in the printer. If IT had setup a print server, or the unspecified model printer happen to have an internal print server, it would have been easy enough to just power cycle the printer or print server to clear the queue, or just flush the queue locally on your computah.
Yes, that's because you have access to the print spooler and the jobs are spooled locally on your machine. You also have admin rights to cancel jobs on your print server.
Huh? What does Time-Warner cable service have to do with administering a printer or print spooler? A better description of what you're working with would be nice.
Sure. A variation of that is to setup a printer pool. If one doesn't print, the next in line take over.
There are two "outside" possibilities. One is outside the IP addresses that are available in your IP block. That's the desireable way because it means you don't need a static route or gateway to make it work. The printer would be 192.168.xxx.xxx and be within your netmask. If they select a printer that is outside this range, you will not be able to talk to it because of the netmask.
If they select a routeable IP address, then IT will need to setup a gateway to get to the printer. This can be done but is messy. There's also no good reason to do it this way.
Keep it inside your netmask at 192.168.xxx.xxx. However, there are few gotchas. The IP must not overlap any existing DHCP IP address pools. That's to keep the DHCP server from assigning the IP address of the printer, to a workstation. If you're running out of IP's, that's a possible problem.
The other is that the access points probably have "AP isolation" running, which prevents you from seeing other client machines and attacking them via wireless. Basically, nothing goes from wireless to wireless via wireless. That doesn't apply to wired connections, which is why the shared printer works. If someone has the bright idea of installing a wireless printer, the "AP isolation" will need to be modified or abandoned, neither of which are good ideas. The printer has to therefore be wired.
If by some coincidence, the printer is on a Unix or Linux server, the "cancel" command will clear the print queue and remove *YOUR* jobs without trashing anyone elses. Similar commands are available for Novell, SunOS, OS/X, and various Windoze mutations. I don't want to detail them all. I'm really curious how Time Warner fits into all this.
Perhaps it would be easier if you just learned how to identify what hardware and software you're using and learn how to cancel a print job? You do work for IT, so this should be easily accessible information.
Hint: If you have techy questions, it's best to supply:
What problem are you trying to solve?
What do you have to work with? (hardware, software, versions, etc).
What have you done so far and what happened? You did so-so on the first and left out everything of importance on second. The third isn't really relevent for this issue.
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