10.5: Use shared printers from pre-10.4 Macs

Dec 03, '07 07:30:01AM

Contributed by: Phoenix1701

Upon updating to Leopard, I (like many others) discovered that the printer I had shared on another computer was no longer accessible. In my case, the printer was connected to a beige G3 running Jaguar, but the following hint may also work for printers shared from other versions of Mac OS X, as well as for Linux boxes.

After rummaging around the Internet looking for a solution, I came upon this article on Apple's support Web site that suggests typing the following Terminal command:

cupsctl BrowseProtocols='"cups dnssd"'
All that command actually does is add the line BrowseProtocols="cups dnssd" to the file /etc/cups/cupsd.conf. By default, the cups protocol (which is used by older versions of OS X, among others) is not enabled in Leopard, and this command re-enables it. If you find that this command still doesn't help, there's an even more drastic solution, as described on this page: instead of enabling cups, simply enable every available browse protocol by typing:
cupsctl BrowseProtocols=all
This has some side effects (your internal modem, if you have one, will decide it's actually a fax machine), but it worked for me.

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