Unable to verify the printer on the network

yup, her (and all the other home network computers) obtain an IP address via DHCP lease. I could try deleting her lease on the router, but as I mentioned, everything has been restarted so this should have done that job via those means.

The printer is the only node (apart from the router GW) which has a hard coded IP address.

Hi Jay, thanks for your help on this. I will try your suggestion tonight at home. Thanks.

It is really baffling me, especially since on a very basic Ping networking level, the printer doesn't

respond to her MBP. It's almost as if the IP is being filtered somewhere, which made me switch her firewall off completely for testing.

This didn't help. There's no other software that I can think of that might be interfering. She does have some other printers installed on there for when she's in the office (Brother, Canon) - will have to ask her to see if she can print to any of those or if they have the same issue - but they don't use JetDirect etc and the printers shouldn't be interfering with each other anyhoo?!

The problem has been ongoing for a while now, started on 10.9.4 and now is also on 10.9.5 so the Mac OS update hasn't resolved anything. The new Apple HP printer driver package has been installed too during my attempts. It is most annoying and weird.

Upon fiddling around the other night, the Mac was able to see the printer again and I was able to set the printer up using the normal JetDirect Socket. I haven't changed anything on the Mac or on the network to enable it to work, it just worked by itself...until....

today...she tried to print again and we have the same problem as before. The print queue that worked for the last 4-5 days, now queues all the documents sent to print, and the Ping to the printer from her MBP reports no route to host again (the IP is definitely on the network as my computer can ping to it).

This is really weird. I have no clue what is going on. I'll try the Safe Boot next....

Yeah, I would agree with you completely Greg, but the baffling thing is it just affects this one Mac. How come it routes 'selectively' so to speak? It works for everyone (incl. Windows 7 machine) but not for my GF's MBP... until such a time that it suddenly feels like working again (all by itself by the looks of things).

You are right in saying that it defo appears to be some kind of routing problem, but I'm having difficulty in finding out where the problem actually is. Is it the router, the printer or her computer? Could it be the firewall on the router blocking it for her and not for others for some reason? If it was the router, you would expect it to tarnish everyone with the same brush, would you not?

Whilst the HP printer has the static IP manually set up on that side (192.168.0.100), the router hasn't specifically been told that the printer has the .0.100 address hard coded into it I don't think, so there is a possibility for it to be going weird here. I'll need to look at the router config page tonight and just lock that 0.100 address to the MAC HW of the printer. Perhaps that will do the trick, but still wouldn't explain why it's doing it selectively just to that one computer (not even randomly to others on the network).

I did try the safe boot too. Within that I ran Disk Utility to fix some file permission errors (there were some group permission problems for the new HP software that I had installed on her computer actually, which DU had fixed). Whilst running the utility, it did throw back issues about the EFI partition map being corrupted etc, but that seems to be a separate problem with the disk utility software not being able to run/fix from the disk it is being booted from, even in safe mode. But this is being discussed elsewhere on Apple Forums and I don't think it's connected to the IP problem I'm having.

Whilst I was doing the Safe Boot thing, I got sidetracked (isn't that always the case when you troubleshoot) and didn't try and set the printer up within that environment, but instead was trying to figure out why I was getting the EFI partition Map errors. It turned into a late night and I had to hit the sack at some point... 😉

I tried IPP too. Putting the Printers IP into the address field on her computer didn't result in the HP Printer profile being selected when it tried to find the printer, this stayed as Generic PostScript. I didn't explore any further on that occasion to see if I could manually set it all up and print to it or if the set-up would just hang again. I figured if the IP address of the printer isn't visible to the computer (ie. no route to host), then changing to IPP wouldn't work either.

I'll give these options another go tonight when I get my hands on her computer again.