Buffalo Tech's LPV2-USB-TX1 Print Server

It seems that I'm becoming a loyal customer of Buffalo Technology, Inc.

I bought this nice little print server today after a few months of preparations. I always wanted to connect my old HP DeskJet 842c to a print server. It's very convenient to print from any computer in the network without having one computer always on. Finally, I found out that my old friends in Buffalo Tech started to sell their own print server. I couldn't find any independent reviews on the prodcut, but have seen a few complaints for other cheap print servers. Anyways, it's in my network now. Surprisingly, installation was a breeze.

I had a couple of days of trouble with their WBR-G54 router in last Fall. I bought two of them to make a bridge between to networks, and they refused to work. It was over a weekend, I couldn't get through their support line. I was very angry and ready to return a product, but on Monday I was able to speak with a support person. After brief conversations with their tech support personnel, everything went fine. I was very impressed with their engineers. Product documentation sucked, but support people (based in USA!) were extremely helpful. These routers are nice products, verry stable so far. They beat with features every other competing router, having things like WDS and bridge functions. Firmware is based on Linux and available for download from the web site.

This time, with a print server, I was able to install everything myself without a bump. Now it's connected to my Windows 2000 PCs and RedHat Linux server. For the latter, I used hpijs driver. It prints fine but seemingly slower than from Windows. This little device supports several protocols such as IPP, NetBEUI, AppleTalk etc. I think there's Linux inside.