>>Well, an obvious question - does your printer still work? If you attach it directly to a computer via a parallel printer cable, does it work?
>>
>>For reference: http://www.dlink.ca/products/?pid=461
>
>Yes, the printer works fine.
>
>But, there is something I do not understand. In the Device Status, there is an IP Address. That is the address I gave. So, all is ok there. However, in the same page, there is also another section named Printer Status which describes the LPT information. In there, there is also an IP Address. I really do not know why there are two different IP addresses in the profile. And, that IP address points to my main PC. That is the part I do not understand as I cannot understand why there are two IP addresses mentioned in there and why it would refer to my main PC.

First quick WAG: what happens if you set the Printer Status IP address to be the address of the print server, instead of your main PC?

Generally, with consumer printer servers there are 2 main ways to set them up:

1. With the installation CD that came with the device
2. Manually, via Windows TCP/IP printing

With #1, typically the setup software installs a custom printer port and print monitor software on each PC. This combination talks to the print server via (typically) a custom protocol, and if you look at the details of the port or its configuration on a workstation you'll see the print server is referenced by its device name e.g. DP_03A69C, rather than an IP address.

If you go this route, things should "just work". I typically don't like to do this because print monitor software is notoriously buggy. If it's not working you could see if there is a later version of the setup software available for download - what gets shipped in the box with consumer hardware is often a buggy 0.98 version (even if it's called 1.0 on the CD).

With #2, you first configure the print server with a static IP address. Then, at your PC, you install a new Standard TCP/IP Printing port (you get into this via Local printer, not Network printer). When creating the port, you type in the IP address of the print server, and when that's finished usually the port name is autofilled to something like IP_192.168.0.xxx. You then finish the wizard, then select the printer driver from the list and everything should work fine.

Going this route you may have to install a printer driver manually for the printer attached to the wireless print server (i.e "have disk"). If so, always check for a downloadable driver, rather than the one on the setup CD, again because later is usually less buggy. Also, try to use just a plain printer driver rather than any downloadable "complete installation/setup package" that might be offered.

One thing to think about with #2 is whether you want to set up a queue on a workstation or server, to feed the print server. I see from the data sheet the print server has only an 8MB SDRAM buffer. These days, multi-page documents with lots of graphics can be way larger than that. If you have multiple machines sending large jobs to that print server at the same time, the print server can get overwhelmed; in that case you'd have the local print queues on multiple machines trying to trickle-feed separate jobs to the print server. I've seen this result in intermixed print jobs, jobs being partially or completely dropped and other reliability problems.

If possible, I prefer to designate a server computer that's running all the time as a print queue to buffer all jobs sent to small print servers like this D-Link. In that configuration, you would first install the printer on the server computer using the standard TCP/IP port method outlined above. Once you confirm that's working, you make that printer shared. Then, on all the other computers, you install a new Network printer, and choose that shared printer that now appears in the list of available printers attached to the server.

The upside to this is greater reliability, there is only one machine (the server) feeding queued documents to the print server. The downside is that the server must be running in order to be able to print to the print server and printer. This might not be a good idea if you don't have a server running all the time.

If you want to get really tricky, you can actually mix & match. You can set up a shared printer on a server, but also set up a direct connection from one or more workstations. On a given workstation you can even have the printer installed twice, one printing to the server queue, one printing direct, and select the one you want.