Give names to nameless IP addresses

Jun 17, '02 09:38:33PM

Contributed by: sjonke

I have a number of printers at work as well as one at home that I can print to, but since none of them have nameserver entries, my list of printers is just a list of numeric IP address. Not exactly friendly. Even printer (or something else) is in the nameserver, it might not have user friendly IP address. It annoys me to no end that OS X does not let me give names to such printers, but fortunately I found a way to do this via the netinfo database.

Start up the "NetInfo Manager" application in /Applications/Utilities. Click the lock and type in your password to give yourself access. Now click "machines" (NOT "printers"!) in the list at the top of the window and then click to select "localhost" within that. Choose "Duplicate" from the Edit menu (or click the duplicate icon) to make a copy of this entry - we're going to edit it to be our printer. Make sure the copy is selected, not the original, and then in the bottom portion of the window click beside the "name" field and set its value to whatever name you want, but don't put spaces in the name. For example, I named one of mine maxwells-hp2100. Next change the ip_address field to be the address of the printer in question. Quit NetInfo Manager and save your changes when prompted.

Open Print Center and click the "Add Printer..." button. Select LPR printers using IP" from the pop-up menu. Instead of typing in the IP address for the printer, type in the name you gave that IP address in NetInfo Manager. Using the above example you would type, "maxwells-hp2100" into the IP field. Note that if you have correctly entered the name the notice reading "Incomplete or invalid address" that appears below the entry field as you type will disappear. Lastly set the type of printer from the pop up menu, click the Add button and start printing to maxwells-hp2100 instead of 123.456.789.012.

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