Print Server

Recently wireless has taken over as he standard connection for home printing, with the more modern units connecting to the wireless router and providing its own server service. This leaves older or cheaper printers out in the cold as they have to be tethered to a single computer. However since a home server is to be the central point in a homes computer sharing, it can be used as a print server to make USB printers available to all devices.

Hardware

The computer hardware has no special requirements to become a print server, just the obvious addition of a printer and a spare USB port for connection, or parallel port if you still have a printing antique that still works.

Software

The printer will be installed as per any normal computer with just a little tweaking to share it to the network. A Windows installation provides basic drivers to allow quick connection for the majority of printers out there via plug and play and these will suffice, as any connecting computers from the network will be relying on their own drivers to print, leaving the server as a middleman gateway between machine and printer. If native drivers are not available then they need to be obtained from the manufacturers website, while there if there is a choice go for the basic driver package as larger files will have added bloat-ware that is not needed and takes up resource on the server. The setup guide will show how to extract the bare minimum from downloaded package to get printers working.