Bonjour vs. Appletalk

Yes, kind of. I understand the difference now. I was hoping that if I installed the bonjour driver it would solve my problem, but it didn't. It works as long as I have it connected via an ethernet cable and it works right after I unplug the ethernet cable and switch to airport. But after a while, it stops working, i.e. I can't print. It's really frustrating!! Any suggestions?

I have a Linksys WRT54G router, that I'm connecting 2 Macs (a PowerMac and a Powerbook) and 2 PCS wirelessly. The 5170DN Brother Network Printer is located close to the router and connected via Ethernet cable to the router. What I meant is that ran a long ethernet cable from the location of my PowerMac in the next room to the router itself, in order to see if a wired connection works. It did work. I deleted the printer, searched for printers found the Brother 5170DN Bonjour driver and installed it. Then printing works. Then I unplug the ethernet cable and switch to airport. It works initially and then it stops working. As if it's not seeing the printer on the network anymore. It behaves the same whether I use Appletalk or disable Appletalk and use Bonjour. Both the PowerMac and Powerbook behave the same way. The PCs work fine, which tells me that it's not a router problem. Everything was working fine, until about a month ago. Ugh!

This worked! Once I was able to to determine what the printer's IP address was and changed it to static, it was easy. I already had the CUPS driver and it was a snap. However, I wish I could use DHCP for this. Why do we have to use a Static IP? At the very minimum, this is not very user friendly. There has to be a better way to do this with Bonjour. When I went to the Brother site there was a PPD (Postscript Printer Description) driver to download and a CUPS driver. It wasn't obvious what I needed. I first downloaded the PPD driver and went thru the installation to see what happens, but it didn't seem like anything actually got installed. When I was searching for the drivers, I was only finding the previous versions and kept having the same issues. Finally, I figured out how to access the printer administrative menus and found out what's its IP address was. Then I tried the CUPS istallation process and it worked. I wish I had a better understanding of what was wrong. Do you know what is the difference between the PPD driver and the CUPS driver? Is the PPD one used for Bonjour/Appletalk? Anyway, thanks very much for your help. It now works, which is the important part.

I guess I don't understand the difference between IP printing and Appletalk or Bonjour. Doesn't the printer acquire an IP address from DHCP, even if you're using Appletalk or Bonjour. So, why doesn't that become a problem under your scenario of turning computers in different order, etc. I noticed in the settings of the printer that it had dynamic IP address, which I subsequently made static. So, how does IP printing differ from Bonjour. Thanks again for all the help.

I guess for some reason, with my wireless setup when Appletalk and Bonjour were polling for printers out there, the printer wasn't getting the msg. With the wired connection it was. I wonder what changed recently to make it not work any more. I'm curious if other people are experiencing the same issue in their wireless connections. I've seen lots of posts on printing problems due to the 10.4.5 update, but since the wireless/wired connection represents the physical layer of the connection, I would have thought that I would have the same problem in the both cases. hmm...

I would suggest you follow the instructions above for IP printing, using the CUPS driver. This worked for me and my Brother Network Printer.