wireless printing HELP!!

If you explain to us how you connected the PC to the printer then we can suggest how to do the same with the Mac.

ton1no wrote:
usb...

In an earlier post you mentioned that you could "print wirelessly with our pc's" but now you mention connecting the printer via USB. I suppose you mean that the printer is connected to one PC via USB but can print from other PCs wirelessly. (If that's not the case, then please explain everything over again from the start.) If my presumption is correct, then PAHU's question would be regarding how you connected to the printer from one of the PCs that were able to print wirelessly.

As William correctly assumed, I did mean that if you can describe how you are connecting to the printer from the PC, then we can advise how you can do the same from the Mac.

So I think we need more clarification about your network setup and the printer. Does the printer support wireless directly or do you have it connected to a PC and it is shared and you are wanting to connect to the PC share via wireless?

Thanks for clarifying your setup and requirements.

Okay, for connecting from the Mac to the Windows printer share there are a few things you need to do.

The first is to share the printer from the Windows computer that it is connected to. This is usually just a case of selecting the printer in Printers & Faxes (or the equivalent) and then selecting to share to everybody. One bit of advice with the sharing name is to make it something short without spaces, such as printer or Samsung or CLX2160.

The next thing to do on Windows is to enable the Guest account on this computer. Later OS's like Windows 7 will disable this account by default, but you want to use this account when you connect from the Mac to the Windows share. So open the User Accounts pane within Control Panel to enable the Guest account.

Now with the printer shared and the Guest account enabled on Windows you can open Print & Fax on the Mac and select to Add ➕ a printer. If you then select the Windows icon in the toolbar you should see a new window with three columns. The first column will show the workgroup names of all the Windows computers in your local network. This may take a couple of minutes to show anything so don't be too concerned if nothing appears straight away. If after 5 minutes no names appear in the list then please reply stating so.

With the workgroup name of the sharing Windows computer displayed (probably shown as workgroup which is the typical default name), select the workgroup name and the sharing windows computer name will now be shown. Select this and you will be prompted for a user account and password. Select Guest. Now the shared printer name you made in step 1 should be shown.

With this name selected you now have to select the printer driver for the Samsung on the Mac. This can be the deal clincher as many Mac OS X drivers do not work correctly when they are connecting to a Windows share. So try selecting the same driver you would use when the printer is connected directly to the Mac via USB. You will probably have to search for this driver by changing the Print Using menu to 'Select printer software' and typing CLX2160 in the search field. With the model selected press Add to complete the creation of the printer queue.

Now if the printing does not work with the Samsung driver selected you may have to try some other drivers. Before we worry about that let us know how the above goes first...

If you don't see any workgroup names in the first column then it would suggest you are not connected to the same network (subnet) as the PC. You mentioned the PC having an IP address of 10.0.0.1. To communicate with the PC your Mac should have a similar address, such as 10.0.0.4. The key is the subnet mask. If both the Mac and PC have a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0, then your subnet is 10.0.0 and each device on this network will have a different last number (known as the network address). So confirm on the PC the IP address and subnet mask. Then on the Mac open System Preferences > Network and the selected port that you are using to connect the Mac to this network should have the same subnet and subnet mask. If the Mac has a different subnet or subnet mask to the PC then this explains why you cannot see the printer share.

Note that with most local networks you want the router to take care of the IP address assignment to all the devices connecting to this local network. This is known as DHCP and it can help with avoiding network issues like the one you are having. If the router is configured to allocate addresses then I suggest you configure the Mac to 'Use DHCP'.

Once you have the PC and Mac set to the same subnet you can check the connection is good by using Network Utility on the Mac. Within this utility is the Ping function which is like a sonar. You enter the IP address of the device you want to ping (the PC in your case) and then press the Ping button. If the connection from the Mac to the PC is correctly configured then you should get a response. If it shows no response then you know that something is not correct with your network between the PC and the Mac.

See how you go with this information.

Could you ping the PC from the Mac and vice versa?

http://www.codedifferent.com/2008/06/28/how-to-connect-from-mac-os-x-leopard-to- a-shared-printe-via-a-windows-xp-printserver/

Where it says to put the computer name just put the computer address in it is easier so for a shared computer on a home network it would be
smb://10.0.0.2/(name of shared printer)
if there is passwords and windows server involved then do
smb://USERNAME:PASSWORD@WINDOWSDOMAINNAME/PRINTSERVER/PRINTERSHARENAME

But try this link it worked a treat for me if you need help with the finer points just post.

Message was edited by: Mick463

ton1no wrote:
ok, so i double checked everything, my mac ip is 10.0.0.3 and my subnet mask for both is 255.255.255.0

The subnet mask isn't nearly as important as the subnet itself. For example, if the IP address of your Mac is 10.0.0.3, then it can only easily see other computers with IP addresses of the form 10.0.0.x.

Hey mate if you are running windows 7 on your pc could you try going to Control Panel-Programs and features-Turn windows features on and off-expand the print and document services then make sure the LPD Print service box is ticked.Then go to the shared tab of your printers properties and make sure the share name has no spaces and is short.If you are running xp you will have to google how to enable the Line printer daemon.Then see if you can show me a screen shot of what you where talking about in your last post.
Cheers Mick463.