Help! New printer keeps going offline

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Level 1

4 points

Help! New printer keeps going offline

I am running OS X 10.11.4 - I just bought a Brother J480DW wireless Printer. It keeps going off-line. Sometimes it take 20 minutes for the computer to "find" the printer and print what was sent. I've done some research and am told that I could have a dynamic IP address on the printer which knocks it offline when the IP address updates. They tell me to right click on my printer and select printer properties but I can't do that on a MAC or if I can I can't figure out how. It says to click the ports tab and select my printer and click configure port and lock in the IP from there. But I don't know how to get there on a Mac.

iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11.4)

Posted on May 5, 2016 5:16 PM

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Answer 1

Sep 19, 2017 11:30 AM in response to mertzma

I have the same printer and it looks like the solution is to make sure that IPv6 is enabled on the printer (under TCP/IP settings). Also, it seems to help to have the default Brother CUPS loaded, and not the Airprint driver.

I just gave the above configuration a shot and everything looks good, but this is only a *tentative* solution (i.e., I just tried it and, so far, it's been working without any disconnections for the past 30 minutes, much more time than any other solution has yielded). Hope this helps others!

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Answer 2

chroot

Level 4

1,102 points

May 6, 2016 3:26 AM in response to mertzma

IP is Internet Protocol. Every network device has an IP address. There is an IP address for the Wide Area Network which is the internet, this is the IP address for your modem. If you have a router (might be built-in to the mode) that you connect to through wifi, you get an IP address for the wifi network which is a LAN or Local Area Network. The IP address is what is used for connecting to all devices through a network. Even if you go to google.com in your web browser, the IP address for google.com is looked up and is what is used for connecting your web browser to Google's web server. By default most routers use DHCP, Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, to dynamically assign IP addresses. A more permanent solution would be the assign a static IP address to the printer so it does not change--to do this you will need to refer to your router's documentation.

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