Tuesday 26 November 2013

Fix the Mac OS printer setup to work with a network Samsung printer 2013



We use a Samsung CLP-6220 network printer from a variety of PC and Mac hardware. It's a great printer - does double sided A4 colour which is just what I need for printed reports. Just one problem - more often than not when printing from one of the Macs it just doesn't work. The Mac spends ages searching for it on the network and can never find it. The Windows and Linux computers have no problems.
If you follow the help on one of Apple's forums, you can 'reset the printer system'. This just deletes all your printers (!), but once you add the printer again it works. OK - so I thought maybe the printer's IP address has changed (because the network uses DHCP), so the mac can't find it any more. So I went into my router control panel and fixed that by adding an Address Reservation so it always gets the same one.
But nope. It doesn't fix it. After living with it for a bit (delete/add the printer sort of works around it although its painful) I had another look. In /etc/cups/printers.conf is the address of the printer. Theres a line in there that specifies the URL for the printer
<Printer Samsung_CLX_6220_Series__SEC001599494557_>UUID urn:uuid:6893396a-3732-3c37-6762-23d7856fdb44Info Samsung CLX-6220 Series (SEC001599494557)MakeModel Samsung CLX-6220 Series PSDeviceURI dnssd://Samsung%20CLX-6220%20Series%20(SEC001599494557)._printer._tcp.local./
It looks like it uses some sort of zeroconf setup so that it should be able to find the printer automatically. It'd be nice if that works!! But it clearly doesn't for my network setup.

So I tweaked it using the 'lpadmin' tool as root so that its permanently on my fixed IP for the printer
sudo lpadmin -p Samsung_CLX_6220_Series__SEC001599494557_ -v socket://192.168.0.11:9100/
So far, it's worked just fine.