The Macs have RJ45 connectors for the network and USB connector for printers. They can see each other with Appletalk. They cannot see the Novell printers.
The user has an HP 2000. Can I put a parallel card in one of the Macs?
Any ideas?
Thanks.
Probably not a good idea even if you could find an adapter as you would probably still have no printer drivers for the mac. If there are drivers you may be able to get a USB to Centronics adapter.
Could you explain why the Appletalk cannot see the Novell printers?
Padeye, maybe you can help me here. My book (I’m learning) says that Novelle Netware can supply connectivity to both PC and Mac clients with IPX. So could Carny just hook up the new printer with the network server, or the print server and get the Macs to see them?
Aenea,
My question exactly.
Did I mention that I am not a Mac person?
You can get USB to parallel converters for $ 40-50 at a variety of sites. I use 2 of them and they work fine. The key is the drivers and I don’t think the CD that comes with the converter has a MAC driver for the converter cable.
PCI based parallel port cards are avail and I use one for a scanner but unless the MAC has a built in driver for the card you might have a problem. I don’t think the manuf bundles a MAC driver with the card.
The problem here is that the Macs are talking Appletalk and the Novell boxes are talking IPX. So you either need to teach the Macs IPX or the Novells Appletalk. I know Linux boxen can communicate in both of those, so if it gets dire you could scrape up a 386 to be a printserver for the LAN, but you should be able to get all the machines talking one protocol. (I use TCP/IP and SAMBA to get the Windows, Linux boxen, and Amiga here to play nice.)
Windchaser
Protocols, now that is what I was thinking. Novell can support Macs thru the IPX protocol, so says my book.
So since you are using Netware, can you tell your macs to use the IPX protocol and then maybe they can pick up the printers on the network, no extra converters needed?
Appletalk gives a choice of Ethernet TCP/IP where I assigned IP address or DHCP (?) where the Macs leased IPs from the Novell server.
Neither setup could see the Novell printers.
Thanks
this may or may not be what you need… a software (and hardware adaptor) package called “PowerPrint”
The problem is that TCP/IP and DHCP (which is an IP assignment system) aren’t IPX. IPX is in its own little world. I think you need a specific Novell Networking client for the Macs; I don’t think Appletalk wil do it.
However, I’m only marginally familiar with Mac networking. So I could be wrong. I know that I run TCP/IP and IPX machines on the same LAN and they can’t see each other at all; machines with both protocols installed can see everything.
http://www.novell.com/search/macintosh.html
That link may go to IPX drivers for Macs, but Novell is moving away from IPX in favour of TCP/IP. (IIRC, version 4 (or maybe v. 5) uses TCP/IP by default, with IPX as a backward-compatibility option.) Macs certainly run TCP/IP, so the problem is just to get the servers and printers to see that as well as IPX. That’s just a driver installation and assignment of addresses.
(Disclaimer: I only helped with a Novell installation, and it was a while back. Consult your local wizard.)
OK, I feel competent to answer this one, having been a product manager for cross-platform Mac-PC networking products, some of which were particularly oriented to cross-platform networking.
There are two issues to deal with here: network communication protocols and printer page description languages. The computer and the printer must have at least one of each in common in order for the computer to print to the printer via the network.
Given that the OP mentioned the presence of a USB port on the Mac in question, I have to assume that it’s a G3, G4, or iMac. All of these have 10/100Mbps Ethernet built in, and support AppleTalk and TCP/IP network protocols with no additional software or hardware.
According to HP’s web site, of the HP2000C series printers, the 2000CN includes the HP JetDirect 300x external print server, which offers 10/100Mbps Ethernet networking, with IPX/SPX, TCP/IP, DLC, and AppleTalk supported.
On the page description language front, the MacOS includes drivers for two page description languages: PostScript and QuickDraw. We can safely disregard QuickDraw for this discussion. The HP2000CN supports only HP’s own PCL3 page description language. HP claims Mac support through the use of Adobe’s PressReady product, which converts PostScript to other PDLs.
In order to connect the Mac to the printer to print successfully to the HP2000, you’d need the HP JetDirect 300x print server, and you’ll need to install the Adobe PressReady software on the Mac. If the printer is available to other Windows users on the network, then you almost certainly have the print server in place. The reason the Macs don’t currently see it is that none of the print drivers already installed on the Mac are designed to support the HP2000C. It’s also possible that the JetDirect is configured with AppleTalk turned off, in which case that will need to be changed as well.
There are good reasons why IPX and TCP/IP are not practical for the purpose of printing to this printer, but they’re too tedious to go into here, unless you’re really interested in this on an academic rather than practical level. In brief, while Prosoft’s Mac Client for Netware does allow Mac users to see the Netware NDS printers, it does nothing to provide a print driver for the Mac that’ll work with the HP2000, and Adobe’s PrintReady drivers don’t support the Mac Client for Netware. TCP/IP printing is just too ugly to talk about.
BTW, the PowerPrint products mentioned above, while an excellent series of products, does not support the HP2000 series printers.