I thought this worthy of mention since I was "educated" a few days ago... The third-party options for network printing have been mentioned, as well as the upcoming MPE/iX 5.5 support for JetDirect boxes. However... We have had a dozen or so JetDirect cards in LaserJets for some time, mostly for Novell or Appletalk, but one was used from the 3000 with a third-party package (ESPUL in our case, not a plug; I'm trying to stay generic here :-) ). Configure the IP address from the printer control panel and off you go. We recently got a 5000/C40D (I posted that earlier) with a JetDirect EX box. Using the supplied software, we had it on a Novell queue in no time but we wanted to get to it from the 3000. Ooops... no way to configure the IP address! Only answer was bootp. The documentation on that is rather cryptic, assuming you're loading the (extra-cost) Unix software and using their utilities. Then I was pleased to find ESPUL had a bootp daemon with a clear example file. I think this applies to other packages, and I know it's planned for the upcoming MPE version as well. Probably not news to most of you but I never understood why you *had* to have bootp until I got an EX box. In fairness, I received a private reply from an HP person stating that the newer EX boxes had a new EPROM that would let you telnet to the box and set the address. Now my final point, which I learned from reading the ESPUL docs, is that these boxes will report status to a "syslog" daemon (also provided). The neat part of this is that you get console messages for the networked printers (never knew about that part either!). So once installed, you get console messages on power-up, online/offline, intervention required, etc. I may "retrofit" this to some of our other printers, it's a handy little feature. I don't know of the other vendors provide the syslog daemon, nor if it is planned for 5.5, but it is certainly handy! Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>