When I managed to get this approach working, I was pleasantly surprised to discover a welcome side-effect of the print spooler: it was perfectly happy to accept print jobs when the printer was turned off and hold on to them until we turned the printer on. True to its name, AppleShare IP’s print spooler would accept print jobs sent to it via TCP/IP rather than AppleTalk, and it could then send the print job to the printer via AppleTalk over the LocalTalk cables. The solution turned out to be AppleShare IP. (Wireless gateways from Mac-savvy manufacturers like Asante and Proxim can bridge AppleTalk packets appropriately, but when I bought the EtherFast, it was quite a bit cheaper than the competition.) Although the EtherFast works well on the whole, it doesn’t bridge AppleTalk packets between the wired and wireless segments of our network, and since the LaserWriter Select 360 understands only AppleTalk, we needed a way around the Linksys’s limitation.
I initially set up the AppleShare IP print spooler so we could print from AirPort-only Macs (before I’d finished the wired Ethernet network) through the Linksys EtherFast wireless gateway we use for bridging between wireless and wired Ethernet. That was important, but we had become even more fond of the print spooling feature in AppleShare IP.
The Performa 6400, thanks to a PCI-based Ethernet card, served as the bridge between our main Ethernet network and the LocalTalk cabling for the printer. It’s a good printer, and in fine working order, but it’s accessible only over LocalTalk.
Tonya and I have an old Apple LaserWriter Select 360 that we use for all our black-and-white printing.
#HOW TO PRINT AN IBOOK ON MAC MAC OS#
Nagging performance and stability problems caused me to move most of its duties to the Mac OS X-based Power Mac G4/450, but the Performa remained active for a single purpose: print spooling. Until its internal file serving duties were taken over by a Power Mac G4/450, it was our internal MP3 server, Retrospect backup server, and it also hosted Now Up-to-Date & Contact’s Public Event and Public Contact servers. It used Mac OS 9.1, the latest possible for that model, and was running AppleShare IP 6.3. Performa Printing - The last holdout was our Performa 6400, which was winning the award for most gratuitous use of an old Macintosh. The last hurdle to making the conversion to OS X was setting up print spooling in Mac OS X, and here’s the story of how I set it up and turned off the last essential Mac running Mac OS 9. For everyday operation, though, every Mac is in Mac OS X. That’s not to say that most of our Macs can’t boot into Mac OS 9 when necessary, but the only reasons I’ve had to switch back to Mac OS 9 recently were to run Norton Disk Doctor to perform a media check on a hard disk with bad blocks, and to use the floppy drive in my PowerBook G3. Printer Sharing and Print Spooling in Mac OS XĪs of this writing, my internal network has only Macs running Mac OS X.
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