Sierra 10.12 can not install printer using Bonjour

Question

Sierra 10.12 can not install printer using Bonjour

After a near total rebuild of my home network, I discovered that I could not print to my less than year old HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M277dw. HP LaserJet 2420dn worked no problem. I deleted printer. I reset printing system. I tried using static IP instead of DHCP. I turned off all wireless functions on the printer. I tried other machines on my network. I was able to print from my iPhone. I was able to add the printer to Lion, Yosemite, El Capitan, Windows 7. Everything worked but Sierra (I have no High Sierra). I could add the printer manually if I specified the IP address.

Self discovered solution to benefit others, but I would appreciate an explanation or a fix from Apple.

The default Bonjour name of the printer was too long.

"HP Color LaserJet M277dw (xxxxxx)" could be found but a communication error prevented creation of the printer queue.
When I shortened the Bonjour name in the printer configuration to "HP Color LaserJet" I had no issue installing the printer with a DHCP address on my Sierra machines.

Does anyone have any knowledge of a limitation with Bonjour names present in Sierra 10.12.6 or other revs?

MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2012), macOS Sierra (10.12.6), +many others

Posted on Sep 14, 2018 6:49 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Eric Root

Level 10

684,039 points

Sep 14, 2018 7:26 PM in response to Gregory Daniel

Try setting up another admin user account to see if the same problem continues. Please post back on whether or not this worked. Also try the Safe Mode. Please post back on whether or not this worked.

Isolating an issue by using another user account

Safe Mode - About

Safe Mode Startup – El Capitan. also Sierra

If it works in the Safe Mode, try running this program when booted normally and then copy and paste the output in a reply. The program was created by Etresoft, a frequent contributor. Please use copy and paste as screen shots can be hard to read. Click “Share Report” button in the toolbar, select “Copy to Clipboard” and then paste into a reply. This will show what is running on your computer. No personal information is shown.

Etrecheck – System Information

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Answer 2

Sep 15, 2018 7:25 AM in response to Eric Root

Other than trying another admin account (I keep a generic admin account on my Macs for precisely this reason), I did not try the other troubleshooting suggestions. The problem seems to revolve around DNS, mDNS, IPv6 and Bonjour. I have an overly complex network configuration at home, more like a datacenter. I had to replace my router which was doing DHCP and Static IP DHCP and had to reverse engineer all the ethernet to IP assignments. My new router has new capablities and is being more "helpful" with regards to autoconfigurations and FQDN and IPv6 which is not playing well with my MacOS Server DNS setup.

Ultimately I resorted to setting up the print queue using the static IPv4 address and the AirPrint protocol instead of using the Bonjour discovery.

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Answer 3

Sep 14, 2018 6:59 PM in response to Gregory Daniel

Scratch that solution arghh. I deleted the printers and it failed to reinstall them again.

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Sierra 10.12 can not install printer using Bonjour

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