Printing to the network via USB Ethernet

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94 points

Printing to the network via USB Ethernet

I have a pair of MacBook Air's that are using the USB Ethernet adapter to connect to the local ethernet (wireless is not an option, all workstations must be wired while in-house.)

The problem I run into is that both of these MBA's will loose their connectivity to the printers, or their ability to see bonjour devices at all, or Appletalk devices. In particular, I've installed a set of OkiData printers on the network which support both Bonjour & Appletalk. When I setup the printers as IP printers, they seem to work fine. However, if they, or any other printer, is connected as a Bonjour device, eventually the MBA stops recognizing/seeing/looking up Bonjour items on the network.

Any thoughts on why this is or how to correct it would be really useful, especially since some day the users might like to do some bonjour-based file sharing.

Thanks!

MacBook Pro 15" 2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, Mac OS X (10.5.8), 4G RAM

Posted on Mar 25, 2011 12:21 PM

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Answer 1

Tylerkrh

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Apr 6, 2011 7:15 AM in response to Lionchild

I am having exactly the same problem, please help!

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Answer 2

Lionchild Author

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94 points

Apr 7, 2011 10:25 AM in response to Lionchild

So far, it seems that if I setup printers as LPR connections with IP addresses, they'll continue to work even if I can't talk to Bonjour-based printer connections. This isn't really useful if you're using a Bonjour-based network, but it is at least some sort of work-around, but requires a little bit of tech-savvy to pull it off.

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Answer 3

Tinsun

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Jun 9, 2011 7:23 AM in response to Lionchild

I have a client with the exact same problem. No bonjour when attached via USB ethernet (Apple's own) SOMETIMES. However, I've noticed that if she unplugs and tries the other usb slot, it seems to work (immediately, no reboot). I've actually only told her to do this over the phone, but it has worked at least twice.

One problem here is that the printers are NOT accessible via bonjour over WLAN, since the WLAN is at least 2 different C class networks.

The other is that due to the setup of the printers and crap drivers from Ricoh, using personalized printer queues only works over Bonjour and not TCP. Thus, only USB ethernet can be used for printing. It would be very interesting to hear if changing usb ports might help in your case as well. This particular client has a late 2010 MBA 4G/128G, but at the same department there are at least 7 MBAs where no-one has had the same problem. Either that, or they had it but never told me.

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