I thought some of you may be interested in this:

I'm working on setting up a document imaging system (actually two different systems, but they're closely related) at the place I work at and for part of it to work, one of our ASPs needs access to a local printer. An HP4050 Laserjet with an Intel NetPort Express 10 printserver was selected for this task. No problem I thought, I'll flash the ROM, setup LPD and put it on the 'net to make sure it's working before placing it behind a firewall and forwarding the appropriate socket.

So after setting up LPD and testing it out with one of the Win2k PCs I called up the ASP, gave them the neccessary information and had them print a test page. A couple minutes later the print server froze up and reset itself. Puzzled I had them send a couple more test pages and the same thing happend again each time. Ok, I thought. I'll just setup a FreeBSD box to act as a go-between print server.

The first thing I did was attempt to print via LPR. Using that technique the jobs were sent off to the Intel print server, but then disapeared and never printed out. Ok, I thought, it must be a *nix LPR problem, let's give Samba a shot. So I setup Samba and found a nifty printing script (smbprint?). Since it was written for Linux a few path modifications were needed, but after that it looked good. I tried sending a test page through it and got a message that access was denied. That's strange, I'd setup the script to login with a valid account. At this point I used smbclient to manually send a test page which resulted in the same access denied message. I was able to print to other printers on the network that didn't have this type of print server w/o any trouble.

I finally broke down and took a look at Intel's website. Guess what I found? A nice script they had written for Unix boxes that allowed them to print to NetPort Express print servers. I ran it, told it I was in Linux (since BSD wasn't one of the options and the two are very simular) and out came a test page.

The moral of the story?

When all else fails, read the docs

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