So, years ago Nikki gave me a Buffalo Airstation so I could connect some of my archaic non-wifi enabled devices to our wifi network. I realised when I bought our Kyocera FS-1030D that I could use the Airstation so that we could have a wireless network laser printer. This would be ‘nifty’ as they say.
Of course, I’d forgotten what a pigging bastard the AirStation is to configure. Currently, I think it’s configured right, but I’ve never worked out how to connect to *it* once it’s configured to be on the network. Conceptually it’s meant to be ‘transparent’ I suppose, but that means I configure it to work via DHCP and it goes ‘plink’ and appears on the network only as an IP address that’s unreachable until you connect it to something.
And then you can’t tweak it’s configuration because it just hands everything straight to the device it’s attached to.
Which is unhelpful.
Then I connected it to the moderately archaic 1030D. Now, the 1030D was around when I was a network administrator and knows nothing of this WiFi of which you speak. It also knows about Mac OS 9 (with the odd nod to X in the configuration stuff) and is, thankfully, still supported by Kyocera’s Network Admin utility. The only problem is that Kyocera’s Network Admin utility is Windows only.
I do not have a Windows machine. I have a mac.
Macs and Mac OS 9 software aren’t friends anymore. They don’t talk. Not at all.
So the Mac configuration utility won’t run. The Windows run might run if I had a windows machine. It doesn’t, anywhere obvious, say what the minimum spec for the Windows app is, so I can try it on my Windows 2000 Server install on VMWare, but… most things look quite puzzled about the idea of running on Win2k. Although, to be fair, that’s kinda appropriate for installing a Kyocera FS-1030D driver.
Once I’ve got this massive behemoth of networking software installed, the next step is to see if I can tell the printer to please get an IP address that I can talk to. It’s moments like this when I really miss the obtuse and difficult interfaces of printers with displays on such that you can go painfully through them and configure things. Because at the moment I can’t configure the bloody thing at all.
This is, of course, one of the perils of having IT experience. You know stuff is possible, even with crappy old equipment that was never exactly the best, so you go and try things that other people probably wouldnae even consider. And that leads you down paths of circling insanity as you try and find user manuals for equipment that was considered out of date 5 years ago. Still, it gives me something to do.
