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How to access a printer and scanner from several workstations

L

Luis Ortega

macrumors 65816
Original poster
May 10, 2007
1,137
327
I have a classroom with a dozen G5 Mac Pros running Tiger and we want to allow them to use a couple of A3 photo-quality inkjet printers and a couple of flatbed scanners.

I see that the airport base station extreme only has one usb port.

Is it possible to use one airport extreme base station to connect all of these peripherals, add airport cards to each Mac Pro, and be able to use any of the printers or scanners from any of the Macs?

What other equipment is necessary?
Should we look to buy any specific printers or scanners that will be more compatible?
Is there some other approach that will work better?

Thanks for any advice.
 
gsahli

gsahli

macrumors 6502a
Jun 1, 2007
655
32
Chicago
To do what you want, you should buy a multifunction device with ethernet or wireless built-in. This is because the manufacturers supply network-capable drivers for these models, but their drivers generally AREN'T wireless/network capable otherwise.
 
Gentile

Gentile

macrumors regular
Apr 29, 2007
195
7
Ohio
You can hook all the printers to a USB hub and plug that into the USB port on the extreme to share them.

The scanner will not work wirelessly using the Extreme. As a previous poster said, I think you need to buy the multifunctional printer/scanner with built in wireless to use a wireless scanner.
 
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