[DayLateDon]

Hello ...


We have two ethernet-connected printers on our network (a Canon imageRunner and an HP Color LaserJet). References to these printers in the "Printer" popup of print sheets, or in the Print Center/Setup Utility is ... unpredictable.

Currently, for instance, the Canon is listed twice in both areas, because it's associated with two separate "Host" computers ("Office1.local." and "Office2.local.") despite not actually being hosted by either Mac. The HP is (correctly) identified as not having a host at all.


Sometimes these printers appear in the "main" part of the Printer popup on the print sheet; sometimes they're in the "Rendezvous" or "Shared Printer" sub-menu; most frustratingly, sometimes they don't appear at all. (When they don't appear, I seem to have to re-enter their IP addresses in the Print Center and get back to them.)


The problem occurred in Jaguar and continues after an upgrade to Panther.



Suggestions?


Thanks,

DayLateDon

[kennedy]

We, too, have been experiencing chaos; it was problematic in Jaguar; it is absolutely unworkable in Panther.

Anybody ever get this to work consistently??

DIAGNOSIS:

Here's what I've surmised. We had a color laser printer on the network (TCP/IP). We also had two Macs set up serving USB printers. Well, any Mac on the network could print to the color laser printer via Rendezvous and the generic Postscript driver. That includes the Macs that are acting as USB servers. Well, when those Macs print to the network printer, they ALSO share it. Then the other Macs see 2 or 3 instances of the color laser printer... one via Rendezvous and one or two via Shared Printers. Then, of course, people not know which to pick, end up picking arbitrarily.

So, then you start queueing jobs to the network printer via 2 or 3 different queues. That leads to lock-ups where neither queue is printing. The work-around has been to go to the printer sharing macs and stop the queues, then enable one at a time, let it clear, stop it and enable the other. That gets the jobs printed. Then we delete the network printer instances from the print-serving Macs. But then many of the other Macs on the network were pointing at some of those "shared" instances of the network printer... they start queueing to nothing.

Sound like a plausible analysis?

SOLUTION: (sort of)

Do not use both network printers and Mac Printer Sharing. So, I took my network printer off the network and connected it via USB to the Mac that is serving two other USB printers. Easy enough.

REMAINING QUESTIONS / PROBLEMS:

Most of my users are currently defaulting to one of the instances of the networked color laser. If they print to that, it acts like it succeeds... no error... but, of course, nothing comes out as the printer doesn't exist. It would be nice if the printer's no longer found, if OS X would blank the printer name or put "No Printer Selected" or some such. Instead it just leaves the networked printer's name there ("COLORLASER").

All my users need to do is click on it, and select one of the printers under Shared Printers... and one of the choices is "Color Laser". I can put those instructions on the printer... but I'd rather do something more proactive...

Q1) Can I purge those COLORLASER settings? I am tempted to do a 'sed' through /Users/*/Library/Preferences/*.plist changing all instances of COLORLASER to Select Printer.

Q2) Can I set a logon message that will be displayed when each user logs into their network account?

Q3) Can I setup a bogus print queue named COLORLASER that will report a custom error message whenever used?

Other solutions?