Network Printing

• Introduction
• General notes on network printers
• Network printer queue names
• Seeing what network printers are already set up on your computer
• Notification and paper size
• Setting up your computer to use a networked printer
• Setting up SAP to use a specific SAP printer queue

Introduction

There are various network printers set up within schools and other areas within the Faculty of Arts. No matter where you work within the faculty, there will be some network printer located not far away (and on the same floor) that you can use. If you are new to Monash Arts and don't know where your local network laser printer is located, just ask someone from your area who is in a nearby office. The chances are, though, that your computer may well already be set up to print to that printer.

Because they are to be used by many people, we put the best printers we have into these roles (ie they are robust, reliable and fast). The downside is that if you only need to print single pages and fairly often (such as email), you may be doing a lot of walking to to pick up printouts. If that's the case, your school may need to buy you a personal printer or put in another network printer possibly redistributing the existing ones to reduce walking distances. Those sort of issues are matters for the school or area to address.

General notes on network printers

In general, you will be able to print to all the networked printers your school or area owns (unless access has been limited for a certain printer for some reason - for example, the head of school's secretary may have a networked printer that only the head and secretary can print to).

You will not, in general, be able to print to the printers of other schools or areas that you do not belong to.

If you think you should be able to print but cannot, it may be that you are not logged into Novell (or that someone else who doesn't have sufficient print rights is logged in on that computer).

Network printer queue names

Each networked printer will normally have a notice taped to it that tells you the name of that particular networked printer. A typical name might be P-CL11-W506-A

Here, the P tells you that it is a printer .
The CL11 stands for Clayton campus, building 11 (the Menzies building).
W506 tells you the room that it is in.
A means that it is the first printer in this room (in this case it is also the only printer).

In place of CL it may have CA (Caulfield campus), BE (Berwick campus) or GI (Gippsland campus).

Seeing what network printers are already set up on your computer

You can see what printers are set up for your computer by doing the following. Choose START/SETTINGS/Printers.

If you then choose View by Details, you'll be able to see what printers have been set up on the computer. Local printers (ie attached directly to the computer - not networked at all) will probably have names like "HP LaserJet 4" or similar. If it has a name like p-cl11-w506-a or even something simple like "French section" or "LCL Staff 5th floor", it will probably mean that it is a networked printer. In this case, right clicking on the printer and choosing Properties (or choosing File from the menu then Properties) will allow you to explore the setup of that printer. You will find the print queue name on one of the tabs there.

Notification and paper size

In the Printer control panel (START/Settings/Printers), you can right click on a printer and choose Properties. You will see a number of tabs here.

A tab of interest is "Netware Settings" (or maybe "NDPS Notification") where you will see a box marked as "Notify" (or something similar). If this is ticked, you will receive a popup confirmation that printing is complete each time you print something. If you don't want to have to keep clicking on OK to get rid of this message, you can turn off the "Notify" tick box. You certainly wouldn't want this on if the printer was in the room with you.

Under the tabs marked "General" and "Device Settings" (and maybe other places depending what operating system is on your computer [Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP]) you will see references to paper size. This should always be saying A4. If it says Letter or something else, it needs to be changed, otherwise you may find the printer constantly stopping and saying "Insert A4 paper" instead of just printing. Normally when the printer is set up, these will all be correct by default. Contact ArtsIT helpdesk for assistance with changing the paper settings if that is needed (in Windows 2000 it may need to be changed in many places).

When the printer gives a message asking for A4 paper to be loaded, it can either be because the printer driver isn't set up to use A4 by default or because the document you have there is set to be US Letter paper within the document itself (this would probably only happen if you were sent the document from elsewhere say by email, or you created the document at home with a version of Word that wasn't set to create new documents as using A4 paper by default).

Setting up your computer to use a networked printer

Click here to see instructions for Windows 98

Click here to see instructions for Windows 2000 and Windows XP

Setting Up SAP to Use a Specific SAP Printer Queue

Any printers in Arts that have been set up to be SAP printers should have a label on them to indicated the SAP printer queue name. This will normally be of the form ARTS-FRENCH or ARTS-GES-SECR (as examples). Once you know the SAP name of the SAP printer queue you wish to use, following these instructions to make that you default in SAP (so every SAP print job from then on prints to that SAP printer queue and hence comes out on that printer).

First, get into SAP. Before going any further, choose (from the menu bar)"System" then "User profile" then "Own data".

Next click on the "Defaults" tab (as indicated by 1) then on the little icon indicated by 2.

You will now be given the opportunity to give a pattern to be matched - put in ARTS-* which will tell it to only show printers with names starting with ARTS- ie all the Arts printers (if your SAP printer doesn't have this style of name, you may need to just put * so it will show everything). Once you click on the green tick (or just hit Enter), you will be presented with a list of printers that match the criterion.

You can now browse the list to find the SAP printer that you wish to use. Double click on it to select it.

It will now appear in the box as the OutputDevice (as indicated by 1 below).

IMPORTANT: You need to click the floppy disk button (as indicated by 2) to SAVE this choice (otherwise the next time you come into SAP, it will be back on what it was previously).

That's it. Any special reports that you print that go to your default SAP queue will now print on the printer you've selected.