stand alone print servers?

[miketyler]

I have been asked to support some events lately and one of the recurring needs are guests coming in to the war room needing to print.

I usually set up a local Wifi router with printer connected via TCP/IP on the LAN, then TCP/IP map each user. I'd rather not have to load drivers manully for each PC.

What I would LIKE to do is have a portable device that would behave like a full blown print server or like a PC with a shared printer that only requires you to click on the shared resource link, and the device would issue drivers on the fly, then map the printer.

Short of an open laptop setup doing this, is there any one of the print server set top box products that does this? From my reading I think they only offer a way to get your USB printer on the LAN without a PC.

[mustang_revival]

No matter how your connect the client, they are always going to need the drivers. Print server or no print server.

Maybe have a desktop setup connected to a printer, the person moves on a USB stick what they want to print.

[miketyler]

Yes, I know that, its how they get them I am trying to improve upon. When you share a printer on your PC you can go in and select what drivers you want to keep on the host. These are what the host will issue out when anyone tries to map the shared printer. The host PC will query the guest PC to see what OS its running and then it will issue drivers to the guest. Its a beautiful thing. I would guess this probably has to be a PC then to get this functionality.

[John -- '02 HAWK]

http://www.google.com/cloudprint/learn/

[miketyler]

Yes, that's a thought. Same concept as HP's e-print where the printer is connected to the web and has its own email address. The data we'll be printing however will be confidential for internal use only and will be security violation to have it on mail or cloude servers other than our own.