On 3/8/06, Kris Kerwin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi folks! > > I have a quick question. > > I'm a college student. I share my printer with my roommate. We have > separate computers; he uses Windows XP, and I Gentoo. Together, we're > behind our school's router which dynamically assigns us both IP's. > > Currently, in order to share our printer, we simply unplug it from one > another's computers. However, we would like to be able to share it > over the network instead to make life easier for the both of us. > However, there are a few problems that I'm foreseeing. > > First off, I have a laptop with only one ethernet port, so setting up > an ad hoc network between us is out of the question. Also, my school > has a "one port - one computer" rule that prohibits routers. > > Second, since we're both behind a DHCPd server, we both have dynamic > IPs. There's no easy way to point his computer to the right server if > it has a dynamic IP. > > Third, since we're both behind a router, using something like DynDNS > to provide a static contact despite the dynamic IP won't work either. > > So, I guess what I'm wondering is if there's any way to make this > work, or if I'm SOL? >
It would seem that people are thinking about this problem just a bit too hard. Here is how my network is setup. All users have DHCP addys, its a mix of mainly Gentoo with the odd Windows box. The printers are all connected to Gentoo servers which have cups and samba setup. Cups serves printing for all the Linux boxes and is also hooked into Samba so the windows boxes can print. As far as IP addresses go... screw em... use the netbios name of the machines, for the Windoze box this will be its hostname and the same is true for the Linux box (I don't think I had to do any extra setup in Samba to make it broadcast a netbios name). You will then be able to print locally from the Linux box via CUPS and you can install the printer just like any other shared printer (\\your_gentoo_box\printer_name) under Windows. Gentoo has excellent Samba setup howtos if you need more info. In this case you break no rules and there is no complex DNS setup stuff. Hope all this makes some sense. -Mike -- ________________________________ Michael E. Crute http://mike.crute.org Linux takes junk and turns it into something useful. Windows takes something useful and turns it into junk. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
