Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) doesn't see HP1200 Printer over network

For the Mac to see the printer on the network, it would have to support an advertising protocol like Bonjour. From some of the information I could find on this model, it appears to be an old printer and may not support Bonjour, but may have supported AppleTalk, another advertising protocol that was last supported on Leopard (10.5). So instead of trying to find it on the network, if you know the printers IP address, you can add it to the Mac by selecting IP > HP Jetdirect-Socket for the protocol.

Are you able to print to the LJ1200 from the XP laptop? If yes, then we can check what it uses to connect to the printer. On XP, open Printers and Faxes and select the HP. The right click and select Properties. From the next window, select Ports and then click Configure. This will show what protocol is being used other settings that may help.

Hi,

Print a configuration page of the printer, this can be done by clicking the Go button

You should find the IP listed within the TCP/IP section.

Then go to Print & Scan, click the plus icon and select the IP tab,

Select the HP Jetdirect-Socket and type the IP into the address field.

Hope that helps,

Shlomi

mikehenden wrote:

Yes, XP box will print with no problems. The 'Properties' index was where I got the IP address from. Have looked at the 'ports' tab, have a port number and see that the protocol is 'Raw'. SNMP status is enabled and SNMP devide index is 1. Does this mean anything to you?

Yes it does. XP is using RAW Port 9100 to connect, which is called HP Jetdirect-Socket on OS X. Given that you have already tried creating a printer queue using HP Jetdirect and this did not work, there must be something else that you need to do.

It also sounds odd that the configuration page you printed does not show an IP address set in the printer. Does the Ethernet cable connect directly to the LJ1200, or is there some type of adaptor between the Ethernet and printer?

mikehenden wrote:

So if we have an IP address and JetDirect, what's the missing piece?

A couple of things come to mind.

One is that we may need to specify a queue. With reference to XP again, there would have been a port number set for RAW Settings. Was this 9100 or some other number, like 9101?

The other thing is the printer driver. If the port set in XP is 9100, then add the printer again using HP Jetdirect-Socket, but select Generic Postscript in the Use menu. If that does not print, then delete this printer and create again, but this time selected Generic PCL Laser in the Use menu.

mikehenden wrote:

Unable to verify the printer on your network.

Unable to conect to '192.168.1.48' due to an error. Would you still like to create the printer?

If you click OK (or whatever is shown) to still create the printer, what happens when you print to this queue?

mikehenden wrote:

How would we specify a queue? Right now that field is blank (default)?

???!!

If XP is showing 9100 then you don't need any additional info here. It can be left blank.

I would expect that the G5 with 10.4.11 is using AppleTalk to communicate with the printer.

So this latest issue with XP not working explains the issue with the 10.8 Mac. Do you know how to get a network configuration print from the Jetdirect print server? Sometimes there is a button you can press. If not, then hopefully Shlomi will return with this info, as I have very limited experience with HP products.