I have a pair of Brother printers on my wired network. Brothers
implement Bonjour almost universally.
I have a wireless access point on my network (actually a router
running in access point mode, i.e., a vacant WAN port and no DHCP
service), which is nothing more than an addressable node hanging off
my actual router (a wired router that needed to be located where a
wireless signal would be wasted).
On my Macs, I defined the printers using the "default" tab, which
found and configured the printers over Bonjour just fine. For
example, the URL of one of my printers is recorded as
mdns://Brother%20MFC-6890CDW._pdl-datastream._tcp.local./?bidi
where "mdns" means Multicast DNS, or Bonjour, and I have no idea what
all the garbage is after the name of the printer.
Here's my problem: I can print just great, as long as I am cabled into
my wired network. If I go wireless in the house, the printer suddenly
becomes inaccessible. But only to the printing subsystem -- I can
still talk to its internal webpage, and so on. If I move to a wired
location, my queued print job will run fine.
Curiously, the printer above can itself be connected wired or
wirelessly. When I set it up wirelessly, the opposite occurs: I can
access it when I am also running wireless, but not when I am wired
into the network.
I had a bright idea a week ago: I revisited the access point's
configuration, found "enable PNP" (Windows term for Bonjour) and
disabled it. I thought maybe the wireless box was intercepting
Bonjour traffic and limiting it only to other wireless devices. But
it turns out that the problem stays the same no matter how that switch
is set.
I could punt and define both printers as IP printers, in which case
I'm sure they would run fine from anywhere in the network, and I will
if I have to. But I'd like to be able to understand what the heck is
going on with Bonjour, and be able to continue to run via it if
possible.
--
Macs R We -- Personal Macintosh Service and Support
in the Wickenburg and far Northwest Valley Areas.
http://macsrwe.com
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