2.2.2. Printer Sharing

A nearby runner-up in significance to file sharing is printer sharing. While the reality of the matter is that laser printers are at present so reasonable that you can bear to place one in each office in the event that you wish, sharing laser printers among the clients on the network is still more inexpensive in general.

Printer sharing empowers you to lessen the quantity of printers you need furthermore to offer much higher-quality printers. More up to date advanced copiers that can deal with large print jobs at more than 80 pages/min and give extraordinary printing features are expensive. Sharing such printers among numerous clients bodes well. Printer sharing should be possible in a few ways. The most widely recognized path is to utilize print queues on a server. A printer queue holds print jobs until any right now running print jobs are done, and afterward automatically sends the holding up jobs to the printer. Utilizing a print queue is effective for the workstations since they can rapidly print to the print queue and don't have to sit tight for the printer itself to handle any holding up print jobs.

Another approach to share printers on a network is to give every workstation a chance to get to the printer straightforwardly (most printers can be configured so they are associated with the network simply like a network workstation). For this situation, normally every workstation must sit tight if numerous workstations are competing for the printer.

Networked printers which uses printer queues have a print server that handles the job of sending every print to the printer one by one. The print server capacity can be filled in various ways:

a)   By a file server that is associated either straightforwardly or over the network to the printer.

b)  By a PC associated with the network, with the printer associated with that PC. The PC runs uncommon print server program to perform this job.

c)   Through the utilization of an inherent print server on a printer's network interface card (NIC), which contains the fundamental hardware to go about as a print server. For instance, numerous laser printers offer an alternative to incorporate a NIC in the printer. This is far less costly than committing a stand-alone PC to the job.

d)  Through the utilization of a devoted network print server, which is a container about the measure of a deck of cards that associates with the printer's parallel or USB port (or even a wireless 802.11 protocol association) toward one side and the network on the flip side. Devoted print servers additionally contain the equipment important to go about as print servers. This can be a decent choice when you have to share a printer that does not contain the vital networking associations.