My WPS54G just died yesterday: this is a Linksys (nee Cisco) Printerserver that supports a whole slew of USB based printers. I had it tied up to my Canon MF5650 printer and if I remember correctly, installing was as easy as.
So, to the local computer grocery chain where they only had the WPSM54G (Linksys info page) for a price of 89.99 CDN. The sad part was that we had to look for the device because obviously, not too many people will buy these printer servers. That is probably because most printers nowadays come with an ethernet connection. Additionally, installing printer servers can be confusing and I suspect many people will just give up after a couple of tries.
Here’s my first tip: You do not need to install the Linksys drivers or software. On all your local computers that need to have access to the printer, you only need the proper printer drivers and most likely you already installed those drivers.
So, here goes again:
- Wire up the device up to your network. By default it will automatically get an IP address (DHCP): it shouldn’t be too hard to find it on the network.
- Open up the ip address in your favourite webbrowser: leave the username empty and enter the default password (“password”).
- Set the IP address to a static IP address, change the password and set the wireless router properties. Here comes something that got me stuck first. For some reason, it’s supposed to work on wireless and not on wired. I have not been able to get it to work on both: so, make sure you set the proper gateway and credentials to your router. After you installed the firmware, take out the wired ethernet cable.
- Make sure you get the latest update of the firmware: 1014 is so shoddy that it didn’t detect my Canon printer. Version 1019, made the difference for me.
- At this stage, it should be time to start setting up your Windows machines and the principle is the same as described in the posting regarding the WPS54G, that is in 5 easy steps: 0. Add Printer 1. Local Printer… (uncheck auto detection) 2. Create a new port (TCP/IP) 3. Enter IP address (generic network card) 4. Select the proper printer and you should be go.
Afterthoughts: We had tried to print pages on our old printer server the day before and the moment the 1019 update was applied, these prints made it through. Note that I used the same IP address for the new server: so the moment the printer started spitting out pages from yesterday, I knew that the printer should be working, despite what the Linksys software suggested to me (“No Printer found, LOL, try again”). In short, the software is extremely lacking here and you can take my advice above at heart: There’s no need to install that Linksys crap load. Make note of the printer support page though (if you have a multi-functional printer…)