Networking: A Beginner’s Guide Fifth Edition- P59:I have run into many people over the years who have gained good even impressive working knowledge of PCs, operating systems, applications, and common problems and solutions. Many of these people are wizards with desktop computers. | 272 Networking A Beginner s Guide Working with Printers Before setting up and working with printers on a network you need to understand the components involved in network printing and how they interact. Understanding Network Printing A print job is a set of binary data sent from a network workstation to a network printer. A print job is the same data that a computer would send to a locally connected printer it s just redirected to the network for printing. The network workstation that sends the print job to the print queue is responsible for formatting the print data properly for the printer. This is done through software installed on the workstation called a print driver which is specific to each type of printer. Printer drivers are also specific to each operating system that uses them. In other words an HP LaserJet 5si driver for a Windows XP computer is different from a HP LaserJet 5si driver for a Windows 2000 workstation computer. More troublesome different versions of the same operating system sometimes use different drivers so a driver for a Windows XP computer might not work with a Windows Vista computer and vice versa. Print jobs are often sent to the network through a captured printer port. The network client software redirects to the network one of the printer ports on a networked workstation such as LPT1. The process of redirecting a printer port to a network printer is called capturing. Usually captured ports are persistent and continue through multiple logins until they are turned off. Print jobs sent to the network go to a place called a print queue. The print job sits in the queue until the network can service the print job and send it to the printer. Print queues can hold many jobs from many different users and typically are managed in a first-in first-out fashion. Print jobs are removed from print queues and sent to actual printers by print servers. After sending the complete job to the printer the print server removes the job from the queue. You
