LAN Printing Techniques

Abstract

During the early development stage of local area networking technology, the sharing of expensive laser printers was one of the primary reasons cited for using that relatively new technology. In a client/server environment, all network traffic originated by client workstations first flows to a server to include print jobs. A printer server is a computer that runs network software developed to extract print jobs from print queues residing on a file server. Through the use of a print server, network printers can be located at any location where the print server can be connected to a network. Remote printing represents a network printing technique that turns a workstation into a limited-function print server. A remote printer capability is established by loading a terminate and stay resident (TSR) program on a PC connected to a network. The key advantages with the remote printing is its simplicity, because the installation of the TSR program can be performed in under a minute.