BARTWeb Printer Installation Instructions
Using Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional
This document outlines the procedures to install a printer for the new BARTWeb application.
There are only two printers supported by the new BARTWeb application. They are:
To connect the printer to your computer, you will need two types of cables. A power cord and an interface cable. The most common type of interface cable is the parallel cable. The parallel cable has two different connectors on the ends of it. One is a 25-pin, male end. The other is known as a Centronics connector. To identify it more easily, a picture is shown below:
There are two ways to hook up printers. One is locally; the other is network attached.
A locally attached printer is one that is connected directly to a computer. It connects via a parallel cable or USB cable most commonly. If your office has a network already installed, and the computers are connected to that network via interface cards, then a locally attached printer can be setup in such a way that it is shared for the other people in the office to use.
The other type of connection is a network attached printer. This type of printer connection is beyond the scope of this document.
Connecting a printer locally is a straight forward process and accomplished with just a few steps.
Once everything has powered up, follow these steps:
Sharing a printer to allow other network users to print to it is a great money saving item versus buying an individual printer for each computer to print directly to.
In order to set up a shared printer, the following general steps need to be accomplished:
One of the important items to setup first is to get Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) setup on your network. This feature will allow one computer or DSL\Cable router to act as a gateway, which will allow multiple computers to use one physical connection to the internet.
To setup your own small network you may need to purchase a DSL\Cable Router. There are various models from various manufacturers that allow 4 or more computers to use one Internet Connection that is in your office. A model that supports 4 computers can be purchased for around $60. An example of this type of equipment would be a Linksys EtherFast Cable/DSL Router with 4 10/100 Switched Ports. This would allow 4 computers to access the internet at the same time.
The router that you purchase will need to be configured to run a service called Dynamic Host Control Protocol (aka DHCP). This service will assign a unique IP Address to each computer that connects to it. It is this IP Address that allows your computer to access the internet. You will need to review the documentation that comes from the manufacturer of the router you purchased in order to learn how to set this up. Most manufacturers also offer telephone based technical support you could call should the manual prove too confusing to follow.
The router you purchase will have a port called an Uplink Port. It is this port that you will use to connect to the DSL\Cable router supplied by your ISP.
Once the network router you have purchased is configured and has been connected to the ISP’s router, then you should be ready to start preparing the computers to connect to the network.
Your computer should have a network interface card installed. If it does not, then that will need to be purchased as well, and installed based on the manufacturer’s instructions.
Each computer connecting to the newly purchased router will need a network cable long enough to go from the back of the computer to wherever the newly setup network router is located. The type of cable you will need is known as an RJ-45 Cat-5 cable. These are standard cables and readily available at any computer supply store. The ends of them look like a telephone cable, but they have 8 wires in them instead of the 2 or 4 you may see in a phone cord.
Plug one end of the cable into the network interface card of your computer and the other end in to an open port on the router you purchased and configured.
Each computer connecting to the network now needs to be configured to “communicate” on the network using TCP/IP. This is a standard protocol used by modern computers. The steps to do this are outlined below using Windows 2000 Professional as the Operating System. The various other Operating Systems will be setup in a similar fashion, though the steps required may be slightly different due to differences between the operating systems.
1. Select the “Start” button in the lower left part of your computer screen.
2. Select Settings from there.
3. Select “Control Panel” from there.
4. Locate the icon labeled “Network and Dialup Connections”. Then double-click it to run.
5. Locate the entry that corresponds to the network card you have plugged your network cable into. Usually this will be called “Local Area Connection” or something similar. You can determine this by examining the fields called “Status” and “Device Name” In this example; we would want to configure the connection labeled “Local Area Connection 4” as the Status is “Connected” and the Device Name is “Intel® Pro/1000.” Your Device Name may be different depending on what is installed in your computer.
6. Right-mouse click on the chosen connection. This will display a pop-up menu. Select “Properties” from the menu.
7. This will bring up a window that may look a bit intimidating. You will be on the tab labeled “General”. Scroll down the list in the box labeled “Components checked are used by this connection:” until you see the entry “Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)”. Click on it to highlight it and click the “Properties” button.
8. Make sure that the option to “Obtain IP address” and “DNS Server” addresses are set to automatically obtain them. This is the easiest method to use for configuring your network card. Note that if you were told to enter specific address information, then DO NOT change anything. Click “Cancel” if everything looks good.
9. The addresses that are assigned to your computer will actually come from the router that you configured in the previous steps. Then just click the “OK” button.
10. Close the Control panel window.
11. At this point if things are configured correctly, the computer should be able to access the internet. If not, then something may not be configured properly.
The computer that has the printer attached will be the computer that acts as a Print Server. As this computer will be processing the requests for printing, it cannot be turned off. If it is powered off for whatever reason, anyone trying to print to it will not be able to until it is powered back on. Note the computer only needs to be powered on. A user does not need to be logged into the computer for other people to print to it.
Current operating systems, such as Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Vista all have built in security to control access to resources. In order to allow users to access a shared printer, local user accounts need to be setup on the computer acting as the Print Server.
In order to make things more transparent for the other networked users in the office, you should create the same user account and set the same password that the other people use to log on to their computers with. So go to each person that has a computer and get the Username/Password that they log on to their computer with. This list of Usernames is what you will be using to create new user accounts below. This must be done on the same computer that has the printer installed (i.e. the computer acting as the “server”).
To set up a local user account on a computer running Windows 2000 Professional, follow these steps:
1. Select the “Start” button in the lower left part of your computer screen.
2. Select Settings from there.
3. Select “Control Panel” from there.
4. Double click “Users and Passwords”.
5. Click the tab labeled “Advanced”.
6. Click the “Advanced” button.
7. Right-mouse click on “Users” and select “New User…” from the pop-up menu.
8. Enter the requested information in each field. The Username and password should be what was obtained and written down previously. Just remember to use the same thing the person uses to log into their own machine to make things a bit more transparent to the end user.
a. Un-check the option labeled “User must change password at next logon”.
b. Check the option labeled “Password never expires”.
c. Click the “Create” button.
9. You can add more users if you need to by following the steps above, or click the “Close” button if you have no more to enter.
10. Close the “Local Users and Groups” window, as well as the “User Accounts” window and Control Panel.
Setting up the installed printer to be shared is a straight forward process. The following steps must be done on the same computer which has the printer installed. The process will be the same whether you are sharing the Okidata ML184 or ML320 printer.
1. Click the “Start” button in the lower left of the computer screen.
2. Select “Settings” from there.
3. Select “Printers”.
4. Locate your installed Okidata printer. It will be displayed as “BartWebPrint”. Right-mouse click on it and select “Sharing…”
5. Select the option labeled “Shared as:”. Enter “BartWebPrint” as the Share name for the Shared printer (omit the quotation marks). This is the name that will be seen by the other computer users. IMPORTANT: The name needs to be entered as shown as the new BARTWeb application looks for that name in order to print documents.
6. Click the “OK” button once completed.
Now some information will need to be disseminated to each of the users that wish to print to this newly shared printer. Each person will need to know what the name of the computer is that is acting as the Print Server. To find this out, follow these steps:
1. Right-mouse click on the icon “My Computer”, which is on your Windows Desktop. This will display a pop-up menu.
2. Select “Properties”.
3. Select the tab labeled “Network Identification”
4. Look for the text next to “Full computer name:” This will be the name of the computer. Write it down so it can be distributed to everyone in the office. Your computer name may be a series of letters and numbers and not necessarily a real name. That is ok. For our example, we will use a name of Win2kProLab as the Computer Name.
5. Click the “Cancel” button to close the window.
The final step is to connect each computer to the newly shared printer. The following steps need to be performed on each computer wishing to print to the newly shared printer.
1. Verify each computer has been connected to the network router that was purchased and setup in previous steps.
2. Verify each computer can access the internet. This is a good indication that the network interface card is working and properly configured.
3. Click the “Start” button.
4. Select “Settings” from there.
5. Select “Printers and Faxes”.
6. Locate the icon labeled “Add Printer” and double click it to start the “Add Printer Wizard”.
7. Click “Next” on the Welcome screen.
8. Select the option “Network printer” and click “Next”.
9. Select the option “Type the printer name, or click Next to Browse for a printer”. Enter the name as \\<Computer name>\BartWebPrint, where <Computer name> is the computer name you obtained in the previous section of this document. In our example this would look like \\Win2kProLab\BartWebPrint. Remember, our example used the shared printer name of BartWebPrint and the computer name comes from the value looked up in the previous step, which was Win2kProLab. Make sure when you enter the two backslashes, you press the keyboard key above the Enter key. If you mistakenly press the other slash key, the computer will not be found and you will get an error. Click “Next” when complete.
10. Select “Yes” to use the printer as the default. Click “Next” when done.
11. Click “Finish”.
12. To print a test page, locate the newly installed printer called “BartWebPrint” in the “Printers” window.
13. Right-mouse click on the printer icon to display a pop-up menu. Select “Properties”.
14. Click the “Print Test Page” button.
15. Click “OK’ when completed.
16. Congratulations, you have connected to a shared printer on the network!