Home > Consumer Reviews > Linksys EFSP42 EtherFast 10/100 2-Port Switched PrintServer

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.

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!

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.

Installed and configured this in a few minutes with no problems. It is a two port print server and 4 port 10/100 switch built into one unit for a great price. The extra switch ports are great - these are convienient for hooking up additional machines to the network at my printer's location. The performance is good and the price can't be beat - what else can I say?

Despite review comments I read before I bought product about
difficulty with installation and functionality, I successfully
installed this new product from Linksys using their documentation
with NO PROBLEMS. I replaced my hub and always on desktop PC
that served as home network print server with this product and
my print performance shot up, so did my LAN performance due
to obvious architecture advantages of switch vs hub. I installed
the Linksys software on both Win98 AND Windows 2000. Note Windows
2000 software was NOT on CD, but easily downloaded from Linksys
Website and simply ran the "Setup" wizard. Print Server has
printed both documents, web pages, and photo applications as
well as my home network components can expect. Definitly everything is 3/4 times faster than when I had hub/PC arrangement. And now I get to turn the old desktop PC off, and
use my newer wireless laptops around the house, or other
wired connections at docking stations. I should also note

due to switch functionality, even my DSL internet connection
through the gateway seems faster, due to less lan CSMD contention, especially with overhead of wireless access point
and trying to use other wired connections on
my LAN. Works great.