I have a cable internet conection. Cable modem is hooked to firewall router that shares the connection to 2 computers. I would like to put a printer and if posible a scanner on a direct network connection to the router so both computers could have access to them with out file or print sharing being turned on. What do I need to do this, or is this possible? Thanks in advance.

Maybe I can help.  Simplest idea is to hook the scanner and printer up to one computer and share them through windows with the other computer.  If this doesn't float your boat, you'll need to buy a print server.  Just a little box made by companies like HP for just such a situation.  Do a search on HP print server and see what info comes back.  If you need more help, just let me know here.



toast

You may use a device called a "print server" to attach a printer to a network connection. Some printers already come with print servers installed, but these are usually the more expensive business types.

The print server should be able to support "workgroup" or "peer-to-peer" printing.
Make sure your O/S is supported.

Hooking the scanner to the network is a bad idea.
(1) Getting network support in a scanner means you are paying $$ for business features you do not need in the home or SOHO.
(2) Most business scanning is OCR. Most home scanning is graphics. Graphics are data intensive and a direct connection is necessary for quality color, contrast, and saturation control.
(3) The usual scanner interfaces in order of preference are: [1]USB [2]SCSI [3]Parallel.

Conclusion: Forget the dedicated network attachments for the printer/scanner and spend that extra $$ on better peripherals!

The most cost efficient solution for the 2 person network is to dedicate the most powerful of the computers to be the scanning/print station. Print jobs would be handled transparently w/o user intervention.

Scanning tasks would be done on the local computer, then the finished scans would be placed in a shared folder for the second person to retrieve.

The reason I want to hook it up this way is for security. Anyone who has a cable connection is wide open for hackers. I currently have my network very secure but if I turn on file & print sharing I am wide open again. So I was looking for ways to use these periphials with out the shares turned on. It looks like a print server would work well for the printer. But the scanner may be a no go. Thanks.

Diss_ipator,

Turning on File and Print Sharing will not make your system "wide open" if configured correctly.

What you must do is configure your router to disable netbios broadcasts from LAN to WAN (UDP Ports 137,138,139).

This way your shares cannot be seen outside of your own LAN.

Any decent Gateway/Router will be configured this way by default because this is the most common newbie mistake that will leave a system open to haxOrs.

-xm777