Installed an IOGear GPSU01 print server, a cute little thing with power supply brick, Ethernet and USB printer connection, not three inches on a side. Successfully installed and configured it on two W2K boxes pretty quickly. WinXP took a bit more work, as I had to drop the native firewall (one W2K box had ZoneAlarmPro, and was cooperative about the setup) in order to broadcast and locate the server’s IP address, but raising the firewall after that didn’t prevent printing. Hope to take on one of the Linux boxes tomorrow, as the device supports IPP and LPR.
Retired the old print server, Antigone, who’d served long and well. Originally my hotshot consultant laptop when I joined Blackstone, a 486/100 beauty with 24 Mb RAM and 500 Mb hard drive. Win95 was still perky on it’s 640×480 screen, but something went wrong recently, and network access to the shared printer queue wouldn’t work. A short bit of troubleshooting made it clear a $60 print server was cheaper than continued work on the old dear. Off to the Elysian Fields with her.