Take Control of Wi-Fi Networking and Security, 2nd Edition

Share Printers and Disks

With a gateway set up to handle local computers and hooked into the internet, your next step may be to attach a printer to the access point so that it can be shared among all the local computers. In this chapter, I explain in overview how to use a gateway in this fashion, although the details vary so widely that you may plug everything in and see it work without a stitch, or need to consult the manuals for your hardware to fiddle with settings.

You can typically share printers via either USB or Wi-Fi, while disk drives need to be plugged in directly via USB.

Note: A Wi-Fi-only disk drive is typically network-attached storage (NAS) that relies on Wi-Fi just for networking and needs no special gateway configuration.