I'm looking at getting a new printer (or multifunction device as you might have noticed
my "sharing a scanner" post) and was wondering if anybody has already gotten
his wl500g setup to share two USB printers over the network. Most likely
over the "raw" (aka JetDirect) protocol.

Does it all just work transparently ?

Also, I'm a bit annoyed at the unidirectionality of the printer sharing protocols.
I'm considering otherwise getting a printer with integrated ethernet port so I can check inklevels and stuff, but USB printers are much cheaper, so I was wondering if anybody has figured a way to get job-status and inklevel kind of info out of a networked printer (maybe using yet-another-protocol) ?