Student laptop printing via wireless

Submitted by Cyndi Johnson on Thu, 11/01/2007 - 11:35am.

Hi
all,
 
We have a laptop
requirement program and have turned our large lab back into a classroom as
almost no one was using it. That leaves one small (12 PC) library lab for
student use. While our building isn't huge, it does sprawl and the library is on
the far end of the building. It's not convenient for quickly printing an outline
prior to class, for example.
 
We provide students
with instructions on how to connect to our networked printers and their file
share via the wireless network (managed by main campus computing) and it
works flawlessly for half the students. The others simply cannot connect. We've
done extensive troubleshooting and have had the main campus experts here to
double-check our work but they can't figure it out either.
 
So, now I need to
determine how to provide those students with network printing. We do charge for
printing (they get 600-pages/year free) so I can't allow straight IP printing
and still track it (at least, I don't know how we'd do that). I thought about
putting a couple of computers in strategic areas around the law school;
they could quickly log on and print from a USB key. That's all I could come up
with. Anyone have suggestions?
 
Thanks,
Cyndi
 
Cyndi Dean Assistant Dean for Information
Technology UNM School
of Law (505) 277-0695

 

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Student laptop printing via wireless
Submitted by Cyndi Johnson on Thu, 05/08/2008 - 4:41pm.

Student laptop printing via wireless

Last Nov, I posted about a problem with some of our students being unable to do print/file sharing on the laptops via wireless. See:

http://www.teknoids.net/node/8593/16391

We knew it wasn't a wireless problem because most students could use the network printers and could map a drive to their share. But no matter what, on some fully-patched machines w/updated drivers, it just would not work. We had the main campus networking gurus over here several times, trying to figure out the problem.

Finally, one of them recently found an article about Vista and file/print sharing, and the necessity of opening additional ports on the firewall (we had TCP/UDP 137-139 open). Just for grins, we opened ports 135 & 136 and it worked. Go figure.

So...I wanted to share this just in case anyone else runs into problems.

Cyndi

Cyndi Johnson

Assistant Dean for Information Technology

UNM School of Law

(505) 277-0695

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