Networking Printing Made Cheap, Though Not Easy
Written: Jun 13 '02 (Updated Jun 13 '02)
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Pros: Works great, cheap way to turn a printer into a network printer
Cons: Difficult to configure, poorly written instructions
The Bottom Line: If you're looking for a cheap way to network a printer, and you have the patience to tinker with settings and decipher poorly-written documentation, then it's worth the price.
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| khoiv's Full Review: D-link DP 101 (DP-101P+) Print Server |
When I heard a tech consultant tell me about the D-Link DP-101P+, it sounded like exactly what I was looking for. I have two Macs and two PCs on my home network, all plugged into a LinkSys BEFSR41 hub/router, which allows them to share a single cable modem connection. I want them all to be able to print to my Epson Stylus C80 color printer, which has USB and parallel ports.
The DP-101P+ plugs into the parallel port at the back of the C80, and then you plug an Ethernet cable into it. Theoretically, you should be able to add a printer in more or less the same fashion as you would any other local or network printer. D-Link has some fairly detailed instructions on how to do that here:
http://support.dlink.com/faq/view.asp?prod_id=459
The key line on that page is "To print to the print server, it needs to have an IP address in the same range as your computers." They don't emphasize this enough on that Web page, nor in their printed documentation.
The DP-101P+ ships with a fixed IP address of 192.168.0.1. So any computer that wants to print to it must have an IP address between 192.168.0.2 and 192.168.0.254.
Since all of my computers share the LinkSys hub/router, their IP addresses are in a range starting with 192.168.1.1XX (e.g. .100, .101, .102 etc.).
It took me a while to realize that this was the problem. But once I did, I was able to fix it pretty easily -- well, in a fairly straightforward fashion, anyhow. The DP-101P+ ships with a software utiltity called PS Admin 2.01 (a terrible name), which runs on Windows (I'm using XP). I installed that, and from the main screen, I clicked on "TCP/IP Configuration" and entered in a new IP address -- for my network, the next available address was 192.168.1.105. So now the DP-101P+ was within the same IP range as all the computers on my home LAN.
Also, I had to reconfigure the port for the printer. In the Printers control panel, I viewed the properties for the Epson C80 and clicked on the "Ports" tab. For the port that I had created for the C80 to use (refer back to the D-Link instructions in the URL above), I clicked on "Configure Port..." and changed the IP address to match the new one I had assigned to the DP-101P+.
After that, I printed a test page, and it worked beautifully! I can now print from any computer in my LAN. The C80 is now effectively a network printer -- at a considerable savings from the cost of a 'real' network version of the same printer from Epson.
This whole process was a pain in the butt. It took me a hours to figure all of this out, and D-Link's instructions were pretty lacking -- they're terrible, in fact, for a company that's trying to succeed in the home networking market. Also, since the PS Admin software is Windows only, I was very grateful I had my PCs. Being primarily a Mac person, I'm not sure how I would have been able to configure the DP-101P+ with only my Macs if I didn't have these Windows machines.
(In a strange twist, one of my Macs remains hooked up to the Epson C80 through the USB port, and I can actually print to it even while I can print from other PCs over Ethernet! This seems odd to me and it's potentially damaging, but I found it interesting.)
I'm certainly no networking expert, and perhaps if I was this would have been much easier. But I gotta say, once I got it to work, I was elated. It's only been a day since I've started printing with it, but so far it's pretty reliable and I'm very happy I bought it.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 80
Driver Availability: Windows only
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Epinions.com ID:
khoiv
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Location: New York, NY
Reviews written: 1
Trusted by: 0 members
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