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The silver lining for administrators is that acceptance of LPD printing seems to be on the rise. NT supports it, and devices that support it seem to work in a NetWare pure-IP environment.

However, when all is said and done, it doesn't matter if a print server supports 120 protocols or just three--what matters is whether it supports the protocols that are important to you. To evaluate print servers, we tested eight units under NetWare, NT and Unix. In our tests, the top-scoring Hewlett-Packard Co. JetDirect 500X External Print Server covered all the bases--it delivered the best performance, included excellent management options and worked easily on all the platforms we tried.

Linksys' EtherFast 10/100 3-Port Print Server came in second and earned our Best Value award due to its very good performance and remarkable price (based on the comparative price per parallel port). Although somewhat lacking in management capabilities, particularly SNMP support, for smaller networks the EtherFast doesn't give up much to any product here. It was followed by Castelle's LANpress 3P/100, Intel Corp.'s NetPort Express 10/100 3-Port Print Server and Axis Communications' Axis 5600. A notch or two below those top finishers were Lantronix's EPS-100 Print Server, Troy XCD's XConnect 100 and Digi International's FastPort 3310FTX Print Server.

Many system managers choose to purchase standalone HP print servers because they are compatible with the HP cards in their other printers, simplifying management. Evidently, print-server vendors have discovered this through their surveys--and their sales--because Axis, Castelle and Troy XCD have added HP JetAdmin compatibility to their products, letting you control their devices with the HP software. The market will tell us if this will be enough to soothe system managers, or if compatibility in print servers is as big a nonissue as was OS/2's ability to run Windows programs. Of course, as we all learned watching IBM, trying to be compatible means aiming at a moving target. Therefore, it's no surprise that HP has announced it is discontinuing the JetAdmin program and will move toward a Web-based program, Web JetAdmin; the company says it expects to phase out JetAdmin completely by Jan. 31, 2002.

In addition, system administrators who want to manage third-party print servers with HP software must download the software separately, and rely on separate vendor-supplied software to update the print-server firmware, which gives the HP print server an edge in terms of convenience.

Server Similarities
A number of common threads run through the products we tested. All offer flash memory upgrades, which means they should be able to weather the winds of technical change, at least for a while. All offer some way to produce a test print or status print. The status printout yields, for example, the IP address of the unit, active protocols, number of documents in the print queue, type of printers attached to the device and other information.

We were baffled by the number of vendors that provide serial ports on their print servers, except in the case of Lantronix and Troy XCD--their units let you use the serial ports to turn serial devices into shareable network devices. Card readers, door locks, cash register drawers, receipt printers, and other odds and ends have been integrated using these products.

Some vendors let you control the print server through the serial port. And that's about as depressing as a bullet-proof vest. The protection it offers may be comforting, but the fact you need it at all suggests you're in the wrong neighborhood or the wrong line of work. All the print servers offer configuration options over the network using telnet, Web interfaces and/or proprietary software. As system managers, we'll be as lazy as we can get away with, which means we'd rather not visit the print server to configure it.

Of course, the serial ports can be used to drive printers, since these are print servers, but--for general purposes--why bother? Fewer and fewer vendors make printers with serial ports. Even most "text" is handled as graphics output today--simple one-page letters run to 2 MB or more of data. A file that size takes 30 seconds to process with a parallel interface, as opposed to more than two minutes with a fast serial interface, and a parallel interface is more reliable. Yes, it's true you can run a serial cable farther than a parallel cable. But we think running an Ethernet cable to the printer and putting a print server and a parallel cable in place is a better solution than dragging another serial cable around the office or plant.

We found little correlation between price and total system satisfaction. We were able to get the Castelle, HP and Linksys units up and running in 10 minutes, no matter what OS we used. Others--the Digi device comes to mind--we were still cursing at two days later.

As mentioned in "How We Tested Print Servers" (page 98), we replaced one of our printers with an HP 970Cxi during our tests. This turned out to be a fortuitous choice. It seems that HP has been shortening the ACK, or acknowledgement handshaking pulse, as part of its effort to speed up its printers. The Intel and Lantronix units had varying degrees of trouble dealing with the faster ACK, and would just lock up. According to Lantronix, HP and the other print-server vendors are working on the situation. Still, if you own a newer HP printer, make sure your print server is compatible. Note also that our own, aging original Intel NetPorts (used for comparison purposes and not the device tested here) had no trouble with the new HP printer, even if they couldn't drive it very fast.