PaperCut and Host-only drivers

A host-only driver is a driver that does not support printing via a print server. Instead it only supports direct printing from the workstation to the physical printer. In summary, printers using these drivers cannot be shared over a network using standard server Printer Sharing. Even though some of these printers may have network cards, they behave like locally attached printers (i.e. USB printers). Host-only printers are typically either low end or specialist printers such as wide-format printers. They don’t follow Microsoft’s or Apple’s driver guidelines to support server based queues.

PaperCut can’t solve the driver deployment issue, however it is able to track host-only drivers with PaperCut’s Direct Printing feature! Read more about this feature here.

Categories: Troubleshooting Articles, Print Queues

Keywords: locally-attached, lost driver options, apple, mac canon driver, mac epson driver, epson stylus 3880, BODP, branch office direct printing, direct print