Is p910nd suitable to use in network environment?

ccy · 2013-09-26 23:09:44

I have installed p910nd print server. The p910nd doesn't has the spooling support.

I have two printers attached to p910nd listen to port 9100 and 9101 respectively.

All the network host in my LAN are Windows workstation. I able to configure printers connected to p910nd port 9100 and 9101 and print out is fine too.

As learn from others, some states that the p910nd doesn't have print spooler and it is not suitable for network environment. Instead, they advice to install a CUPS that has print spooler.

So my questions are:

1. Windows has print spooler, is it fine to let windows print to p910nd and won't have problems?
2. What happen if few windows workstation print to p910nd at the same time? Will it works fine?

cfr · 2013-09-26 23:43:06

Well the obvious answer is to "try it and see".

The other answer is that it is not clear why you will believe the answers you get here if you don't believe the advice you've received already.

The third answer is that I imagine that it will not work at all well if more than one machine tries to send stuff to print at the same time, even if it works OK so long as only single jobs are sent by single machines. (And I'm not sure this will always be the case, either.)

EDIT: Actually, I suspect it will just ignore the second machine's attempt to print, though I'm not sure. So maybe that would be OK. (I assume you are not looking for it to queue stuff given that it doesn't spool.)

Is there any particular reason you don't want to use cups which is basically the standard solution?

EDIT: http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/p910nd.server seems to be talking about using it in a network given that it is router-based?

Last edited by cfr (2013-09-26 23:54:09)

WonderWoofy · 2013-09-27 03:02:07

I think taht when used in conjunction with something like cups, which has a spool, it should be fine with multiple machines. I use p910nd on my OpenWRT WNDR3700v2 and it works fine with a number of machines trying to print all at the same time.

In fact, just by chance, I happened to just set this router up today. It replaced a WNDR3800 with CeroWRT, which was great, but I wanted to (relative) simplicity of the standard OpenWRT setup to wrap my head around before moving on to more complex setups. But in that process I had to re-setup p910nd for one of the printers. So in order to test, I printed a test page from the cups interface. After a moment, I realized "Whoops, I forgot to actually enable the p910nd printer!" So without cancelling the test page, I went and turned it on. It takes but a moment to turn on, and so very shortly after I did, the test page popped out of the printer. This indicates to me that the cups spool on the local machine is working just fine in place of the spool-less p910nd.

Of course, I have no windows machines to test with, so all machines on this network utilize the common UNIX printing system. But in your case, since you are (hopefully) implementing this in Arch on an x86 system, I actually think that it probably would make more sense to use cups.

ccy · 2013-09-27 05:16:04

I am using p910nd in Raspberry Pi. In order to make the deployment simple and easy, I wish to install only p910nd but not CUPS. Provided that p910nd works fine in network environment if multiple print requests sent at same time.

cfr · 2013-09-27 22:25:26

Well you need spooling somewhere, I think. Since a second print request will presumably be ignored by the p910nd, you'd want spooling before that point. I guess spooling on every local machine will work since it seems cups, at least, is intelligent enough to manage that successfully.

I would have thought it would be less error prone to install cups on the Pi if all of the printing will go through there but maybe I'm wrong about that. (This is all just a priori which rarely works well with IT.)

(I wish cups worked that way for me when I'm connected to a usb printer directly!)

WonderWoofy · 2013-09-28 02:25:24

I think think that quite a bit of the reason behind using p910nd on a router though is the total lack of both storage and RAM. In the router in place now, there is a whopping 16MB of flash storage and 64MB or RAM, which is actually quite high for a router. So if you were to have a spool on the device you would need to have some kind of external storage just in case either one person decided to print a massively large file, or if multiple people decided to print normal size files all at the same time.

Arch Linux

#1 2013-09-26 23:09:44

Is p910nd suitable to use in network environment?

#2 2013-09-26 23:43:06

Re: Is p910nd suitable to use in network environment?

#3 2013-09-27 03:02:07

Re: Is p910nd suitable to use in network environment?

#4 2013-09-27 05:16:04

Re: Is p910nd suitable to use in network environment?

#5 2013-09-27 22:25:26

Re: Is p910nd suitable to use in network environment?

#6 2013-09-28 02:25:24

Re: Is p910nd suitable to use in network environment?

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