Brother Ethernet printers and LPR via IP

Jan 26, '02 09:59:12AM

Contributed by: robg

I have a Brother HL-1270N that I bought when 10.0 was released. This is an ethernet-capable LPR via IP printer, and that's how I set it up in 10.0, using the PPD from OS 9. Although it worked OK, it would bomb up on the second print job submitted. If you manually powered it off and on, it would then work again. Also, my printer was randomly switching its IP address, which was also a bit of a problem!

Over on the macosxhints' forum site, this thread gave me a solution I hadn't considered - switching from LPR via IP to AppleTalk. So I deleted the LPR via IP printer, enabled AppleTalk (which was added in the 10.1 update) on my desktop machine, then selected the now-visible Brother printer and chose the OS 9 Brother HL-1270N PPD file.

Despite an email from Brother Tech Support posted in the thread that the PPD is only OS 9 comptabile, it works flawlessly in OS X. I can now print multiple print jobs without errors, and I don't need to worry about the randomly switching IP numbers any more. I also switched our iBook, and it works great over the Airport, too.

This should also work for any other AppleTalk capable laser printer that is currently set up under LPR via IP.

Comments (5)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20020126095912105