Cisco-Linksys EFSP42 EtherFast 10/100 2-Port Switched PrintServer

by Cisco

Product Details

Product Manual [2.61mb PDF]

• Item Weight: 3.2 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 0.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B00004XRDB
• Item model number: EFSP42
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: May 15, 2002

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

The EtherFast 10/100 two-port switched print server is an easy way to expand and simplify your small or home office network. With two high-speed printer ports and four standard 10/100 switch ports, the system allows you to connect up to two printers and four PCs (or other network devices) to your network without any additional hardware. Supporting both standard and bidirectional printers, the system is fully compatible with regular laser, Bubble Jet, ink-jet, and dot-matrix printers. And with a 256 KB buffer and automatic collision control, the print server handles multiple print jobs simultaneously and efficiently.

The four internal 10/100 switched ports integrate your 10Base-T and 100Base-TX hardware together in a seamless fashion, running four times faster than a four-port hub, while minimizing cabling and space requirements.

The print server works with all major operating systems, including Windows 95, 98, and NT 4.0, and NetWare, and comes with a three-year limited warranty and free technical support.

Product Description

The Linksys EFSP42 makes upgrading your Small Office or Home Office network easy. Whether you're adding more printers or more PCs, the solution is so simple and affordable it was long overlooked. Amazingly enough, the EFSP42 is the first Print Server to include Ethernet ports--in fact, four full-duplex, 10/100 switched ports. These supplement two DB-25 bi-directional parallel ports, amenable to both 10BaseT and 100BaseT networks 256KB RAM buffer for faster graphics 512KB flash memory for future upgrades Data collision control and polarity correction Protocols - TCP/IP, IPX/SPX, NetBEUI, EtherTalk Free technical support and software upgrades 3 Year Limited Warranty

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A downgraded rating and suggestions for Linksys, January 28, 2002

By 

GrandpaJ "Jeff" (Duluth, GA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cisco-Linksys EFSP42 EtherFast 10/100 2-Port Switched PrintServer (Personal Computers)

Originally, I rated this product with 4 stars. I have downgraded it for the following two reasons:

First, some background. My in-home network has about 5 Linksys products. Their 4 port cable/dsl router which does a good job. In two years, I've upgraded the firmware twice which involves a reboot of the box. Other than those two times, I've only had to recycle power to the box once to clear a problem. I have the Wireless access point and associated PC Card for my laptop. There's also a 5 port hub and the two port print server. So overall, I like Linksys. However, here are the reasons for the downgrades.

1) with the Printserver active, I occasionally get IP address conflict warnings from Windows TCP/IP drivers. I have to cycle power to the PrintServer to clear the problem. This did not happen until the PrintServer was added to the network. My cable modem router is the DHCP server on the network and that functionality is disabled in the printserver and the WAP11, so either Linksys has a problem in their DHCP server in the router or the problem lies with the Printserver. This is not a show stopping issue, it just causes inconveniences until it's cleared.

2) The printserver (two printer model), only has 128kb of RAM. That's not enough. With RAM prices as low as they are, the box should have 32MB or more. I have an Epson 900 color stylus printer and an NEC 1200 laser printer controlled by the print server. The laser printer has no problem printing, but when I send a color job to the Epson, it takes FOREVER. The Epson printed faster when I had it on our server and shared the device. That just slowed the server down when someone else on the network printed to it. Our server is also a work-station (yes, I'm peer-to-peer). Each printer should have 16MB of buffer ram to speed print jobs, especially to an ink-type printer.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Unsupported Product with many problems, July 13, 2003

By 

Andy "Computer Enthusiast" (Jersey City, NJ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cisco-Linksys EFSP42 EtherFast 10/100 2-Port Switched PrintServer (Personal Computers)

I'd like to start off by stating that overall I use and like many of the linksys products, including the routers, wirless products and network adaptors. I also work with computers for a living, so I tend to be able to resolve most technical problems on my own accord. This product attempts to fill an industry niche of allowing any parellel printer to be network ready. It does this in two ways, a browsable print server or a locally configured port.

I was running this product without a problem for a while, although it frequently would get confused and drop the connection and require rebooting. I have it attached to an HP Laserjet 5P which is a very reliable and stable printer. I noticed that if I ran the product in a mixed type mode using some of the browser print servers and some port based configurations, it would crash and just stop working and require a reset. When I changed everything to the same configuration it worked better.

When I tried to configure and work with the print server from my Windows XP Home edition laptop things got very messy. I was able to figure out that the Windows XP built in firewall was blocking any use of the EFSP42 Linksys print server. To confirm my findings I did extensive testing and actually read the firewall logs. Apparently, this server was accessed on the normal port 80, but responds on port 3079. To solve this problem I had to turn off the build in XP firewall. I don't blame this on Microsoft, it was just functioning as a stateful inspection firewall should, however; linksys developed this product long before XP was on the market and has not put out updated firmware to deal with this situation.

I called Linksys and spoke with someone in the tech support, their response was we don't ever recommend using any personel firewalls. Perhaps microsoft and some of the other personal firewall manufactures should be aware of the fact that linksys is telling people not to use their products. The fix is relatively simple for Linksys, simply don't randomly change the inbound port (it should be the same as the outbound), but the technical support person couldn't understand the nature of the problem.

If you can affort to purchase a dedicated network printer, or a print server from the printer manufactures this is a far better long-term solution. You can also use any computer on your home network and set up print sharing and essentially create your own print server.

I tried to upgrade the firmware from the website using the bi-admin, but the version on the website could not recognize me device, so the techntion had to email me a 4 MB file not available to the general public. This updated utility was able to recognize the device, but then when I went to flash the firmware, I recieved a "H/W Mismatch Error". So, now I've send another email to Linksys to try and get the proper "bin" file which apparently is not on their website either. For some reason this product will NOT allow you to update the firmware from the web administrative pannel and requires the bi-admin utility (seems like a very inconsistent solution compared to their other product lines).

My guess is that this product was produced very quickly to fulfil a small market niche and not much R&D or quality went into the design. They haven't undated the firmware in over two years, which apparently has caused many problems. I gave it two stars because the 4 port switch worked, although a "C" note for a 4 port switch seems like a lot. Good luck to anyone who purchases this product, you will need it!

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Works well with Windows 9X/NT and Linux, June 9, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Cisco-Linksys EFSP42 EtherFast 10/100 2-Port Switched PrintServer (Personal Computers)

This product is an excellent value. The print sever works well with my RedHat Linux, and Windows 9X/NT systems. Get Windows 2000 drivers from Linksys. I had just wanted a 10/100 switch, but why not get the printer server and switch for one low price. I would recommend using the print server in lpd mode for Windows NT/2000. On Linux/UNIX just treat is like a server running lpd. Note that you will need Windows to initially configure the product and to set an IP address for the print server. The two parallel ports are logically mapped to lpd printer queues called lp1 and lp2. There is a special driver that must be loaded for printing from Windows 9X clients. I do not have an Apple system, but it can also emulate an Apple print server and there is unsupported Apple configuration software is included on the CD-ROM.