Windows Printer Sharing Woes

Not having a printer was driving us insane at the office, so Joe took a run to Costco and picked up a nice multi-function laser printer - the Brother MFC-8640D. It’s pretty fast; the output is nice; the scanner and copy function work well.

Setup was also a breeze, we connected it via USB to the Windows Server 2003 machine and it printed fine after installing the drivers.

A sweet feature of Windows printing is that you can store the make available drivers for various OSs and the client will download the appropriate driver from the server when you connect the printer to it.

So we shared the printer out and the Windows XP clients worked perfectly, as did the Mac OSX clients.

Now for the kicker.

Our development machines are Windows XP 64bit. No for x64 driver came with the printer, and even though Brother’s website states that they have native x64 support for the printer, I couldn’t find it anywhere.

So for the first time in a very long while, I called the company’s tech support line.

It has to be said, the guy I spoke to went to extreme lengths to resolve the issue, but at the end of the day, he admitted that they don’t support x64 even though the website states that they do.

Then came the unbelievable thing.

Because my problem involved printer sharing, he couldn’t help me any further.

Apparently Brother does not support printer sharing!

This is kinda funny as a bunch of their advertising says “…ideal for home or home office printer sharing…”

Isn’t that probably the highest use scenario for their business customers?

Freaky.

Anyhow, after that unhelpful interlude I thought “what the hell, I’ll just use the x32 driver.”

No such joy. Couldn’t get Windows x64 to recognize it.

One thing the support guy did suggest was to tell Windows that the printer is actually a Brother HL730. That driver comes as a pack-in driver for Windows.

That didn’t help much because at no point during the printer setup did I get the option to pretend that it was another type of printer - presumably because the server had told the client the exact ID of the printer.

Then I had a sneaky idea.

The PowerMac G5 server found the printer and was working fine, so I just shared it out again, this time from the Mac.

I pointed the Windows x64 client at the Mac and it found the printer - this time though, it asked me what type of printer it was, so I said “It’s an HL30. Honest Guv!”

Printer installed.

How amusing is that! To print from my Windows x64 dev machine, the has to be routed via a Mac, which then sends it on to the Windows Server box and to the printer.

Maybe it would have been easier to have just hacked the x32 driver’s installer inf…