[thedude]

I just took a long hard look at my home LAN and realized I could probably share my Laserjet off of my OpenBSD box so that I could give the Samba box the Laserjet is curently shared off of to my little brother. It has more power than I need for a Samba/printserver box and my brother needs a computer (it's a P3 1gig / 512RAM, 30 gig hd).
Now can I share the printer off of my firewall box until I get another box to use as a printser/fileserver like my firewall: http://www.fic.com.tw/product/sff/intro_falcon.aspx
or should I just grab an old box off of the back porch and use it for security reasons. I'd really like this to work as my office is getting crowded and WARM due to all of the boxes I have. Any imput?

[KrUsTy!]

I just took a long hard look at my home LAN and realized I could probably share my Laserjet off of my OpenBSD box so that I could give the Samba box the Laserjet is curently shared off of to my little brother. It has more power than I need for a Samba/printserver box and my brother needs a computer (it's a P3 1gig / 512RAM, 30 gig hd).

Running a print server is no problem. You could do it easily in 2 ways. Have OpenBSD running lpd print daemon or install and run CUPS. LPD is included with OpenBSD by default. CUPS is not. These are the printer queuing systems, but do not directly serve those queues to windows. You will need Samba to interface between the print queue system and the windows computers.

I'm guessing that your laserjet connects via a parrel port from your comments above.

Now can I share the printer off of my firewall box until I get another box to use as a printser/fileserver like my firewall: http://www.fic.com.tw/product/sff/intro_falcon.aspx
or should I just grab an old box off of the back porch and use it for security reasons. I'd really like this to work as my office is getting crowded and WARM due to all of the boxes I have. Any imput?

You could run a print server/Samba off just about any current hardware. Although it might be a bit slow on a 486/p1, any thing from a p2 and up should likely be fine for what you want.

I myself would not put it on the firewall. I would configure another server to do this, and have it be inside your lan. It is really never a good idea I think to have firewalls do other things. Especially performing LAN type services. You raise the likelyhood that you will do something on it to expose yourself to the outside world.

Make yourself a BSD server (Open BSD will work great), have it do print queues (either lpd or CUPS, I myself Love CUPS....) and also have it do Samba to serve the queues to the windows computers. Samba supports bopth lpd and CUPS printer queues.

I doing this very thing with my laserjet via a parrell port hooked to my server which runs CUPS and Samba at home. Works like a charm and I can use windows via Samba, and BSDs and Mac OS X via cups for printing.

{K}