Re: [WinMac] Hiding printers

Thomas Roth(tomroth[at]wfubmc.edu)
Wed, 25 Nov 1998 08:40:56 -0500

>From: "Newton J. Munson" <newt@vims.edu>
>We have some departments with color printers that are expensive to run.
>Students send stuff to those printers by mistake. It seems to me that I
>have heard of a way to hide an Appletalk based printer so it doesn't show
>up in the chooser. I believe it had to do with naming the printer with some
>special character as the first character of the name. Where can I find
>information on this?

It's done at the print server which can be a Novell Netware server running
AppleTalk Printing Services (ATPS) or an NT Server running Services for
Macintosh. In Novell's ATPSCON you tell create a print queue and then tell
it to hide the real printer forcing users to print through the network
queue only. Similarly on an NT Server you capture the AppleTalk port so
that only the server speaks to the printer.

Another possible option is to print to the printer using IP if it's capable
of doing that. Once that's setup and working you would then turn off
AppleTalk on the printer itself using Apple Printer Utility. Of course if
you ever wanted to turn it back on or do anything else to that printer
you'd have to hook it up directly to your computer and you won't be able to
communicate with it over the wire again.

There might be some Mac software based option for doing all this too but
I'm only familiar with network print queue solutions.

>We have had a number of old routers based on a 286 in our network that
>blocked Appletalk. We have been removing those and now we have a lot of
>printers and no zones. What is the best way to introduce Appletalk zones to
>our network, Netatalk or Windows NT server?

We used to seed our zone from our Novell server and this past summer (after
we setup an NT Server) I switched that off and set the NT to seed the zone.
It's fairly easy to do from NT.

 ______________________________________________________________________
 Tom Roth Wake Forest University School of Medicine
 tomroth@wfubmc.edu Dept of Biomedical Communications
 www.wfubmc.edu/biomed Medical Center Blvd
 Tel 336.716.4493 Winston-Salem, NC 27157-1011
 ______________________________________________________________________

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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b2 on Wed Nov 25 1998 - 05:45:25 PST