Setting up the Netgear Print Server WGPS606 in a mixed environment

The problem statement:
My wife and I have a problem. Presently, I have a PC running Windows XP on one desk; she has a PowerBook running Mac OSX 10.4 on another desk. Connected to my PC is a Samsung ML-1710 Laser printer.

My wife would like to print to the Samsung from her Mac.

Further, upstairs in a box is a well-used Epson Photo Stylus 820 inkjet, which was shelved when I decided that inkjets really are Satan-spawn (a decision I made about 3 days after buying the Samsung). My wife would like to use this printer for some light photo printing (at her own risk).

To add further confusion to the mix, I occasionally bring home from work a laptop running Windows XP, and it would be convenient to print from there occasionally. I also have, upstairs, an SGI Indigo2, from where I want to print approximately twice a year.

Requirement #1 comes from the landlord: No holes, and no wires between floors. When we moved in here a few years ago, I purchased a Netgear WGR614 router to provide wireless networking throughout the house. It does the job, and that's about all I can say about that (I don't recommend this particular router).

Requirement #2 comes from the wife: She does not want to have to turn on another computer to print from the one she is sitting at. Thus, attaching each printer to a computer's USB port and using print sharing doesn't cut the mustard. As a corollary, I am reminded that this requirement also implies that I'm not allowed to add any additional computers to the already geeked-out household. (So a Shuttle PC attached to all printers won't do it either.)

I considered offloading both printers on someone else, and purchasing a nice used HP with a JetDirect card. Space and power are a problem though, so I decided against this option.

Off to -insert local computer chain- I went...
Wife and I ended up at the local PC box-shuffler, and came home with a Netgear WGPS606 "Wireless Print Server". The outside of the box didn't say too much about what the device did, or whether it would work with anything other than Windows XP, but it was the closest we found to a dedicated device that would do the job.

Opening the box, I extracted the device itself, a CD, and a 4 page information card. In a nutshell, the installation instructions were:


Connect gizmo to Windows PC 
Insert CD, and follow our Windows-based wizard to configure the device 
Insert CD into each PC that will use printers and configure printers using our Windows-based wizard 
In typical consumer-crap-from-a-box fashion, that's all the documentation that was included in hard copy. The CD had 2 additional documents, but neither one provided any sort of technical information, or any indication that the device would work with anything except a select crop of USB printers and Windows boxen.

Configuring the WGPS606
First task was to get the 606 itself talking to the wireless network. The WGR614 is set to not advertise its SSID and to use WEP (*shrug* it's better than nothing), so just turning on the 606 got me nowhere.
I connected one of the 606's Ethernet ports to my laptop. After reconfiguring the laptop's IP address appropriately, I connected a web browser to 192.168.0.102 (the default IP address for the device) and logged in with admin/password. On the "Wireless Settings" page I was able to configure the proper SSID and WEP key to get the device on the local network. The "Print Server Settings" page allowed me to change the 606's IP address to something appropriate for my local network, and change the device name to something more intuitive than WGPS606.

After making these changes, the device reset and I was now able to reach it from the internal network.

At this point I connected the printers to the devices two USB ports and turned them on. They showed up in the web interface next to "LPT1" and "LPT2", which was somewhat comforting (but otherwise unhelpful).


Now what the heck do I have?
What I didn't find in the web interface was some information about how the 606 interacts with the client computers - I was expecting to see some way to enable IPP, SMB printing, etc etc etc. Nada.
Rather than guess, I pointed nmap at the thing. It's listening on 80/tcp and 515/tcp. Viola, lpd support!


Printing from the Mac
I don't know much about Mac OSX yet, but I know that the printing backend is nothing more than CUPS, so I figured that getting the Mac to talk lpd would be cake. It probably would have been for a real Mac person, but I struggled for awhile.
Here are the CORRECT settings to use in Printer Setup Utility:


Protocol: Line Printer Daemon - LPD 
Address: The IP address of the WGPS606 
Queue: Use L1 for the first port ("LPT1") and L2 for the second ("LPT2"). Note that this designation appears nowhere in the documentation, or in Netgear's knowledgebase (thank you google). 
Name: Whatever you want, just change it 
Print Using: see below 
Print Using selects the correct printer driver to use. For the Epson, the choice was easy: gimp-print provides a driver for Epson Stylus Photo 820. For the Samsung, no driver was listed. Crap.
After digging through boxes for an hour, I located the CD that came with the Samsung. It did indeed contain Mac drivers, but only for MacOS 9 or Mac OSX in "classic mode". Nothing on Samsung's site either - it seems that Samsung does not support using their printers with Mac OSX (but they do support GNU/Linux, go figure).

Fortunately, google saved the day again. Look here for Robert's page about setting up the ML-1710 with a print server and Mac OSX. He discovered that even though Samsung US doesn't support Mac OSX, Samsung Australia does, and provides a driver that works perfectly. Like Robert, I have archived this driver. Email me if it disappears and you need a copy.

I was stymied for awhile even with the correct settings, because OSX was presenting a weird "server-error-service-unavailable" error when I tried to add a printer. This page was mostly unhelpful, but did give me a clue about what was happening. It seems that cupsd wasn't running for some reason. I copied /etc/cups/cupsd.conf.default to cupsd.conf and rebooted, but that didn't help. Installing the latest version of CUPS from their website cured it.


Printing from the Winboxen
Since I already had Windows drivers for both printers, I didn't anticipate any problems here. Unfortunately, by default Windows XP doesn't include support for lpd printing.
To install lpd support, select "Add/Remove Programs" from Control Panel, and the click on the "Add/Remove Windows Components" button on the left hand side. About halfway down, there is an option called "Other Network File and Print Services". Select Custom, and turn on "Print Services for Unix" (on XP Home, this is the only sub-option). Click OK. Support will then be installed, no reboot necessary.

When adding each printer, select "Local printer attached to this computer", and TURN OFF the "Automatically detect and install my Plug and Play printer". On the next screen, select "Create a new port", and set the Type of port to "LPR Port".

Name or address of server providing lpd should be the IP address of the 606.
Name of printer or print queue should be "L1" for the first printer, "L2" for the second.


Then select the correct Windows printer driver as typical.


Printing from the SGI Indigo2
(to be filled in later - my I2 is currently sick) 
And then the problems started...
With everything set up as above, printing worked OK... some of the time.
A decent percentage of the time, the 606 would roach hotel my document - documents check in, but never check out. After a bit of googling, I discovered that the default firmware rev shipped on the 606 (V1.0_018 on mine) is CRAP. Read the release notes for V1.0_020 and cry. I decided to upgrade to the latest firmware, V1.0_025, and all firmware related badness has now disappeared.

I found this to be the case with the WGR614 too - the as-shipped firmware was really buggy. Considering most people buying these boxes would have a heck of a time upgrading the firmware, I really wonder what Netgear is thinking. (Perhaps they are thinking about job security for geeks like me...)




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Copyright © 2006 Greg Nesbitt. Contents may be freely distributed, modified, and included in derivative works, provided attribution is given.