Netgear Print Servers and SBS 2003 or Windows 2003 Server - just does not work!
I've been a strong advocate for Netgear for many years - in fact back in 1996 I had dinner with Patrick Lo - the Managing Director of Netgear and I felt that this was certainly a company that I wanted to be associated with. They typically make a good quality product that is reliable and at a good price. However I've got a big gripe with them about an issue that has been going on now for sine early last year that it Netgear seem to be failing to resolve. I am hoping by publishing this and getting public feedback that we can entice them to resolve it.
So what is the problem? Their most popular and longest running print server is the PS110 - this has dual parallel ports and has been around for many years - in fact they still sell them and I'm not aware of any intention to discontinue them. We've got a lot of sites with these installed and running with Windows 2000 Server and SBS 2000. We print to them via TCP/IP as LPR printers. However it came as a big shock to us when we started upgrading clients to Windows 2003 and SBS 2003 last year to find that these devices would totally lock up when you print to them from a Windows 2003 server. So much in fact that they then fail to respond to pings. Now I've lodged cases with Netgear before on this and the end result I get is that “yes it's a problem and we don't know when we will have a resolution“. So bad is the issue with it now that we've had to resort to replacing them with competing brand print servers from HP. Netgear basically shrug their shoulders at the entire situation. I'm sorry but it's just not good enough. This is a current product and should work with operating systems that have been out nearly 2 years now!
For the record, I've tried other model Netgear print servers and found them to work well, specifically the models I have tested are the FM114P and the PS101 and the PS121. They work fine - now the initial thought might be that we could replace the PS110 with one of these, but the issue is that these are all single port devices and will not work if you've only got a single network connection to share between multiple printers.
So the question is - when will Netgear resolve the problem with the PS110 and make it work with Windows 2003? Have you seen this problem? If so please leave comments so that we can gather momentum and entice them to fix it.