Office Rearrangement

My good colleague Jonathan moved into a new office yesterday and asked me to come up with a solution for this problem. His beloved HP Laserjet 4100, made in 2002, needed a longer parallel to USB cable to reach around his office to his desk. The cable was similar to this one and was only 6 feet long. He needed at least a 20 foot cable since his printer was now behind his desk perched on a file cabinet.

I immediately looked online for a longer cable. It seemed the standard and only size was 6 ft for the parallel to usb interface. Jonathan's flavor of the HP Laserjet 4100 only had a parallel port installed. (Parallel ports are ancient now -- like I said above, I discovered his printer was made in 2002. Can you imagine a 13 year old printer still chugging along?)

Since the parallel to usb cable route was no longer an issue, I started looking at other options. I noticed the printer had some open slots in the back of it -- potentially I could install a network card and connect the printer using ethernet cables and a switch.

Fortunately, we had an old HP printer in our server room that had a JetDirect network card. It was very easy to take out the card of the old printer and pop it in to Jonathan's printer. That was it. No additional configuration was involved. 

I plugged in an ethernet cable from the switch to the printer, and once I had an active connection, I ran the configuration page to make sure the printer had an IP address and host name. The rest was simple: I logged onto Jonathan's computer, added a new printer with the hostname from the configuration page and success! The printer worked.

We had an old JetDirect network card, switch, and some more ethernet cables which enabled this installation. Without them I don't know what I would have done.

May the 4100 continue printing for many years to come!