Interestingnly, a PC magazine review before the retail release of HP mediasmart said it would not support network print server... I guess they were thinking about network discovery plug and play?

Regardless, the mediasmart works flawlessly as a print server.

I have added an old laser printer using a parallell to usb cable, detected and installed automatically. This printer was not listed in the out of the box drivers, so downloaded another model that was compatable with server 2003.

Now, since my media smart sits on the desk, this workhorse printer is availble to all workstations in the house, and is in fact the default printer for all sytems in the house, since I have extra drums and toners for it.

Only hitch is I am having trouble getting my 3 year old's imac to see it (actually have given up), so unfortunately she prints all her colouring pages ont eh hp network colour laser...

Any ideas of how to connect the macs to the printer would be great.

I am going to look into remote printing to it now, I know it was possible to use whs to print to a printer attached to a local computer, but that computer had to be on, so now I am sure it will be a snap to print documents to my home office from abroad.

mp

Not too familiar with macs but I have managed to get linux to print to a windows shared printer pretty much by just using the UNC path name of the shared printer. For example \\myservername\mysharedprintername. You'll have to install the printer driver on the mac but point the output to the UNC path on the server.

You were lucky you had a printer with drivers for win 2003. I am not so lucky, my printers will not install, tried all the drivers ver.
I hear that a future version of WHS will support lots of printers, it should amaze me that microsoft wouldn't think we would want to install network printers on the servers, but it does not.

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As you have noted, the issue is with the printer manufacturers and the drivers they produce. Microsoft needed a solid foundation on which to build Windows Home Server, at the time this was Server 2003. Windows Home Server is a consumer product and as such the consumer printers people own do not have drivers available to work with Server 2003. I don't think it's fair to say that MS doesn't believe people want the server function as a network printer, but rather they had limitations on everything that could be accomplished in the timeframe for V1.

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I'm not sure this will help with your printer, but I've had some success installing an HP Deskjet series printer that also has no windows server 2003 support. I posted it here: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=8673