Lab P-4 Creating a Printer Pool

Often in a business office you’re going to have more than one person printing to a printer, and more than one printer that people can print to. However, if one person is printing to PrinterA and two others need to print now, there may be confusion among users as to where to send the print job, or how to delete one and print to another computer. So in order to simplify that, often companies use Printer Pools.

 

Printer Pools have a few rules:

  1. All printers are “attached” to one printer share.
  2. All printers MUST use the same driver. So we couldn’t do a printer pool with our Brother printer and our Laserjet because they are different drivers.
  3. Using network printers is best, but you can have a printer attached via the network and one to a parallel port and even one USB, as long as they all use the same driver.
  4. The physical print devices are all in one general location. After all, if I send a print job out and it uses PrinterC I don’t want to have to go to three different locations to find my print job.

 

Here’s how it works. User attaches to a printer share. (As a network tech, you’ll probably create a batch file that will do that automatically.) You’ve set up a “pool” of three printers. User prints. The share figures out which print device is available, and his job goes to that device. Another user prints, and if the share determines that PrinterA is busy, it sends the job to PrinterB, and so on.

 

Create a pool:

  1. Our pool isn’t going to work, since we only have one printer. However, we’ll set one up anyhow.
  2. Open up the properties of your share created in P-3.
  3. Let’s pretend we have another brother printer with the IP address of 192.168.1.172.
  4. Go into the Ports tab.
  5. Click “enable printer pooling”.
  6. Create a new TCP/IP port using the IP address above. (You will get an error message saying it can’t find that port, so go ahead and create a RAW port.)
  7. Select that port. You know you did it correctly if you can select both ports.
  8. Note, you do not have to add another driver because you already have it. You can have three, four, five, etc. printers! It just distributes the jobs automatically, so if the boss is printing out end of month reports, everyone else can continue to print and get their jobs.

 

Questions:

  1. What is a printer pool?

 

 

  1. What is the purpose of a printer pool?

 

 

  1. What are three requirements to set up a printer pool?

 

 

  1. What are the benefits of the pool?

 

 

  1. Is water involved?

 

  1. Can I pool Bro and Joe? Why or why not?

 

Have me check off:

 

____ Printer installed

____ Ports created

____ Pooling enabled