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Or alternatively, you could print to the printer directly using lpr couldn't you? Seems like making the traffic walk the wire once to the server, and again to the printer is a huge waste of bandwidth.

The way I had this set up at my last place of buisness (where I was the MIS Lead) I used a Linux box (From Telenet Systems) running Netatalk and Samba to serve the PCs and Macs in the office. This removed any need for using lpr and nfs on the PCs for printing and filesharing, and even thornier problems on the macs.

In any case, the printer (HP 4050TN) was capable of taking print jobs via Appletalk, LPR and SMB over TCP, and SMB over IPX. However, I set it to only accept LPR jobs, and further to only accept them from my linux box, forcing everyone to print directly to that machine so that everyone would be in a unified spool in one location. This way, jobs can always be cancelled from a single point, and everyone's jobs get spooled in the proper order.

Telenet Systems, who was just bought out by BSDi makes fairly nice systems. We use them for firewalls and intrusion detection systems. They even have a quad xeon system now which I'm evaluating for some database work. Check them out at www.tesys.com and hardware.bsdi.com

Try Telenet, recently acquired by Walnut Creek/BSDi. They make good boxes, and Roger from their support team is quite sharp. They're still quite agnostic about what you put on their boxes, despite being owned by BSDi now. They're willing to preload a wide variety of x86 Unixen, including Solaris x86, several flavors of Linux, and of course some BSDs.

Anyway, for support for Unix on x86, I'd say Telenet is the best place I've encountered so far. Much better than Penguin, and not overpriced like VA. And of course, they're far more flexible about what you do, and far more willing to support you if you decide to do something different. Heck, maybe they'd even support you if you loaded Windows ;>

Gee, I hate to poke holes in such deep research, BUT.. if you look at Telenet's homepage, you will see references to "Intel / Alpha / Sparc".

Perhaps you looked at the wrong company?

Don't Forget,

Telenet Systems, www.tesys.com, has great 1U rackmounts. Check them out.

If you ask nicely, they'll even pre-load FreeBSD on it for you. ;^)

I use two kinds of these switches currently and am very happy with both. For home use, I bought one from Telenet System Solutions that controls 4 boxes. It's a push-button jobbie and works about a million times better than a pure mechanical one.

At work, I use one from Wright Line, which is actually made by Apex, to stack Suns together. There's also a PC version available. This one is activated by the Print Screen button on the controlling keyboard and you select the port (which you can apply names to) using the arrow and enter keys. Very simple to setup and use, and quite reliable in my experience.