[ale] printer support in router

[Michael Hirsch]

Oh my God, I'm in heaven.

You may recall that I asked about printer ports on home broadband routers (included below).  Well, I took the plunge and bought a USR 8022 from Tiger Direct.  With the rebate offer it is about $80 with shipping.  It is both an ethernet router and wireless access point.  And it has the all important printer port.

I already had one that was ethernet/wireless (from 3Com--don't buy it), so I thought this just had the one more feature.  Boy was I wrong.  This one is awesome.

First, my old one used to die if you tried to access its DNS server too quickly after acquiring an IP address.  Why?  Don't ask, just reboot.  This one returns dhcp addresses instantly and doesn't seem to crash.  It has port forwarding, DMZ, restrictions based on MAC, ... all the bells and whistles I had hoped for.  My old one only offered DMZ.  Now I can expose port 22 without exposing everything else.

It had a bunch I hadn't even though of.  It can automatically detect certain protocols and open up particular other ports.  It comes preconfigured to detect certain gaming systems (e.g. battle.net) but you can configure others such as Gnome Meeting quickly and easily.  It can do VPNs.  It's accessible through SNMP.  (All that comes disabled by default, of course.)

And, may I say, the printer port worked perfectly.  The only hard part was finding instructions for it.  Finally, I found on the support site instructions for setting up printing on a Mac that gave me the clue that the print queue was named "lp".  After that, smooth sailing.  So we should be able to share all the printer thoughout the house.  Time to see if I can print from my Zaurus!

Then I uploaded the firmware update.  I was blown away by the new features.  First, it has support for dynamic DNS.  Tell it your dyndns.org (others are supported, too) account and it will update it for you when the IP address changes.

The next cool one is ntp support.  It set its time from a server.  I don't think it serves time, but maybe the next firmware update...

There are other cool things.  It can send wake-on-LAN signals to a machine; it can send syslog messages, it can filter packets (incoming and outgoing).

All in all, a very nice device and I recommend it.  Did I mention that the wireless signal seems much stronger than that of my old router, too?

Anyone want to buy a 3Com router?

Michael


-----Original Message-----
From:	Michael Hirsch
Sent:	Mon 4/21/2003 9:51 AM
To:	ale at ale.org
Cc:	
Subject:	[ale] printer support in router

I'm looking for a way for my wife and me to share a printer and ran across 
a broadband router with a printer port.  Anyone know how these work?  Of 
course, the docs say you must have Windows of Mac, but who reads docs.

Can I just use, say, CUPS and tell it that it has a network address?  
Anyone using one of these?

Thanks,

Michael
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