Just when I thought this thread that I yanked off topic was dead my dad
called. Now, he's no Aunt Tillie, he's a board certified Doctor of
Podiatric Medicine who runs his own practice, but he's no evil genius
either. A year ago he had a consultant set up his office with three
networked Windows XP boxes to run his practice management software and
do all that other doctor's office stuff (this replaced his old windows
3.1 machines and a novell network). He bought a laptop with winxp last
weekend and wanted to print to the office printer that is connected to
one of the other computers and shared (sound familiar yet?). He
couldn't figure it out, called me and I had him try a couple things but
we couldn't do it. All I could do was think about the recent threads on
this very matter and shake my head and laugh a little to myself.
Is Linux ready for the desktop? Is windoze even ready? What's that song, Every OS what?
Bryan
Interesting.
About a week or so ago I wrote a big response to one of the earlier Aunt Tillie thread posts about sharing a printer. I argued both sides of the debate, pointing out what I felt were valid and invalid points on both sides. I never sent it because the colo-ISP where I have my mail server changed subnets, and by the time I got everything back up the way I wanted, Sasha had said many of my points in a much more eloquent way.
One of the points I made on the "Luxury" side however was that Win XP and MacOS X both automatically map printers they discover being shared locally on the network. In fact, there is no way to turn this behavior off in MacOS X (10.2.x, at least I couldn't find it easily), so even if you don't want a printer shared, it will do it anyway and other MacOS X machines will automatically map it. I have had similar problems with the automapping in XP, but there is an option to turn it off.
I can't explain why it didn't automatically work for your father, but my suspicion is that the systems were set up initially in some way to prevent it.
Adam Augustine
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