10,000 Foot Developer

I’ve had beautiful DLink DNS-343 NAS server for a few years now and I love it.  It takes four drives, currently I have two 500 gb drives mirrored and two 1 tb drives mirrored.  Everything goes on them, gets backed up, etc.  Hook it up to the local router box and it just runs, dammit.  Love it.

So anyway I also have a great Brother multifunction laser networked printer/fax/copy/scan the MFC-7440N.  It’s monochrome, and is my main squeeze when it comes to most of my printing.  Laser never ever clogs.  Prints forever.  I just hook it up to the local router box and it just runs, dammit.  Love it.

Both machines I just leave on.  They power down, the power drain is compensated for easily by an incandescent I replaced with a CFL in a hall where quality light isn’t needed.  When I need them, there they are waiting on the network.

Sometimes though, I need to print out something fancy and in color.  For this I have a Canon IP-4200 inkjet.   I like the Canon’s because the print heads are built into the cartridges — so if you ever clog, just put a new cartridge in.  I had this problem all the time with an Epson, the heads were part of the machine not the cartridge and if you let the printer lay dormant for a month you spent four hours wasting paper and ink printing out test pages.  If you put new heads in it solved nothing boy did that thing cost me a lot of money an time.

And just for the record, I let this Canon sit 9 months without printing and it fired right up and made gorgeouos color photos — no head cleaning!!! Amazing.

Well anyway, I used to hook the Canon, a USB printer, up to whatever computer I needed but I wanted it on the network.  Guess what?  The DNS-343 has a usb connection on the back just for that!  (Or a UPS, if so inclined.)

So I hooked up the printer, turned it on, and sure enough it showed on the DNS-343’s admin web site.  But, I couldn’t access it from any computer!  I tried and tried the prescribed formula:  1.  Install printer driver on computer 2.  Add via the network, searching under workgroups.

For whatever reason, however I have my local network setup, no computer would find the Canon.  So I thought, maybe I can just directly add it with the ip and some Linux designation?

Sure enough — all’s I had to specify was something like //192.168.0.32/lp and it found the printer.  The IP address (or name, if you are so inclined) of the NAS and lp for the printer.  The “lp” is the Linux symbolic link to the printer, if you were wondering.