Q: Shared Printing Broken On 10.11.6 and 10.12
I am part of the IT staff for a small school district. We have been frantically trying to restore normal print services at multiple locations since building new print servers this summer. We are relatively sure we have clearly identified the problem as something to do with the latest El Capitan and Sierra builds.
All but one of the print servers in our district were clean installs of 10.11.6. On these servers printers have attempted to be shared using multiple methods - not only via the simple "Printers & Scanners" pref pane but also by adding manually directly via CUPS, LPD, and RAW socket, all methods so far produce the exact same end behavior. Users can see and add all printers via Bonjour Shared with no issue, drivers are downloaded if needed (Canon, HP, and Brother printers of various ages are all affected equally) and typically a user can send a print job if they do so within a few minutes.
The problem arises when they go away from their laptop for a while or restart their laptop and try to send another print job. It hangs and never completes unless they click on the printer icon stuck in their dock, pause the job, and unpause it to resend it. Pausing and resending works every time. The printed jobs themselves look fine, advanced driver features respond as expected, and as I said multiple manufacturers behave exactly the same, so I do not suspect driver conflict.
Upon clicking on the print icon in the dock, it reports "Printing - The printer is not responding." and never progresses.
Here's a real slap in the face... we have one print server we upgraded to 10.11.6 rather than installing clean that exhibits none of these behaviors. Clearly some legacy file is helping on this device but I have no idea how to track that down.
We eliminated our networks as the problem by setting up a clean Sierra test print server and placing it on the same network as the working upgraded print server, we attached a single printer to it via USB, and it has the same problems as all of our other cleanly installed El Capitan print servers (we were hoping Sierra might fix the problem, but it does not).
MacBook, OS X El Capitan (10.11.6)
Posted on Sep 30, 2016 9:13 AM