Thomas roots for a non-HP solution to network printing:

> Troy Wireless has a line of one and two port serial print servers similar
>  to Intel's, but if all the printers are in one location, Lantronix' ETS16PR
>  16 port rack mount print server would work quite nicely and probably offer
>  a significant per-port savings.

Let me argue the opposite case, if you don't mind. I am very impressed with
HP's external JetDirect cards. HP said at the outset that the HP3000's
network printing would only work with HP JetDirect cards and, HP being my
"trusted partner," I took them at their word, thus they're the only form of
print servers we've ever used. Nonetheless, I couldn't be happier with them.

We also use HP's free JetAdmin software on all of our PC's. JetAdmin
duplicates the network printing software that's on the HP3000, thus
everything tends to work in a highly coordinated fashion. As I tell people
who attend class here and who I show how our network printing is set up, I'm
a person of nearly infinite patience, but if a process begins to take much
more than a tenth of second, I begin to get quite antsy. The JetDirect
printing tends to work very nicely for everything we do, and works well
within the bounds of my nearly infinite patience.

We use HP's external JetDirect Plus EX print servers on all of our non-HP
"foreign" printers (Tektronix color lasers, Apple LaserWriters, etc.) and
they work very well with every PCL- or PostScript-capable printer we've tried
so far. But we've also found that we have had to use them with some of our HP
printers as well, even though those printers already had internal JetDirect
cards in them. Some of the firmware in some of these older printers simply
doesn't work with the HP3000's network printing. We've corrected that too by
putting external JetDirect cards on those printers as well, as you can see in
the webpage that I put last year during the manufacture of the calendars:

    http://aics-research.com/calendar.html

We've never used any form of the external JetDirect cards other than those
with the single port, simply because none of our "foreign" printers are
physically close enough to one another to have any of the three printer port
cards be of any interest to us. But if I did have a long row of such
printers, such as you might find in a row of teller windows in a credit union
or a bank, putting a 3-port JetDirect card every few feet would seem to me to
be a nearly ideal solution. These cards have proven themselves to work
without fuss or bother with the HP3000's network printing, and while other
people have been able to make non-HP print servers work with the HP3000's
network printing protocols, I tend to be very prone to solutions that are
more or less guaranteed to work flawlessly under all circumstances, and so
far, after three years usage, the JetDirect cards are doing that. We've never
had the slightest form of hiccup with them.

Wirt Atmar

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