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Share a Brother MFC 5100C from MacOS X to Windows 2000/Windows XP
Authored by: NearTheSea on Aug 28, '03 11:31:04PM

I only spent a day trying to get this to work for myself so here's some detail on what I had to do. Note that I was doing this with a MacOS X machine running 10.2.6, a Brother MFC 5100C printer, and clients that were Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

Specific recommendations:
- Use http://127.0.0.1:631/ to access CUPS instead of localhost
- May need to use "native" drivers under Windows XP to be able to select driver and get it to work through the Mac
- Don't really need Samba, Windows 2000/XP can print directly with CUPS, see the option to add a printer via http://..., i.e. put in http://my_mac_ip:631/printers/remoteprintername where my_mac_ip and remoteprintername are appropriate for your setup.
- If you do use Samba, you may need to chmod 777 /var/spool/samba and you may need to add "use client driver = yes" (as noted elsewhere) to avoid permission errors on the Windows side. Samba may give you errors on the console about problems resolving the Windows machine name, these are irritating but not the reason you aren't printing
- CUPS might not be able to print a test page, but that doesn't appear to matter
- Don't forget to use the console and error logs to find out what's happening! If a test page isn't printing from Windows, for example, odds are an error is showing up somewhere in a log. For CUPS errors look at /var/log/cups/error.log.
- You will need to uncomment the line "application/octet-stream" in /etc/cups/mime.types for your raw printer to work.
- Don't forget, if you make CUPS or Samba changes you will need to restart them. Just use the Sharing options "Printer Sharing" and "Windows File Sharing" respectively to do that.

A few more details:

I originally tried to skip the step of adding the raw printer via CUPS but realized later why it needs this. The Windows driver is going to convert everything to the form that the Brother printer wants to see, so you don't want the Mac printer driver attempting to translate that stream from Windows into something printable. Hence the need for a separate, raw driver for remote printing.

On Windows, I had some trouble trying to get it to give me a driver that I could select when adding the remote printer. I had "in box" drivers from Brother but those did not seem to work for this arrangement. What did work were the "native" drivers that were thankfully available for both XP and Windows. Don't ask me to explain the difference, that's why we use Macs, right?

Re using http://localhost:631/ to access the CUPS interface, note that due to the way permissions are set up in CUPS you may have to use http://127.0.0.1:631/ in order to make any changes, ie adding a raw remote printer as directed above. But be prepared, despite *starting* with that IP address, after some clicks I'd have something like iMac.local or some equivalent for the hostname and would no longer be able to do things that required 127.0.0.1. For more on this see http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/user/view/cs_msg/9184 . Another CUPS quirk, CUPS test pages don't always print and this appears to be a know but not serious problem.

If you don't have to, don't use Samba printing, just adds more complexity. See if your Windows "Add Printer" for remote printers allows you to enter an http:// address and if so include the address for CUPS plus /printers/remoteprintername where remoteprintername is the printer you added per the instructions.

Hope this helps someone out!



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Share a Brother MFC 5100C from MacOS X to Windows 2000/Windows XP
Authored by: RickyV on Mar 23, '04 11:20:16PM

Thanks to all that posted on this thread. I really thought this process would be much easier, maybe it is using Panther?

In any case, I combined the various tips on this thread to finally get my Win98 laptop to actually "see" the printer on the network (OS X 10.2.8), and then to print to it.

I was surprised that so much Terminal activity needed to be done to achieve this, but essentially I needed to do all of the Terminal hints in order to get everything working. The one other tip I may have is that I needed to change the browseable switch to yes in the printers section.

This combined with uncommenting the line to let the RAW driver to work were the final touches. Now my wife will be much happier but sadly, I will have to wait longer before we go all Mac.

Thanks



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