Oct
15
Category: 
One of the joys of OS X is that things tend to just work. Indeed, I remember that I spent a long time on the night we got our iMac trying to work out the printer settings before, in frustration, just pressing ‘Print’ and finding that paper came out of the printer with an almost exact replica of the on-screen display. Macs just don’t tend to make any fuss about finding new hardware: attach a printer and it will probably just work, attach a camera and it will probably just work, attach an external display and you won’t need to press f5.
Networked printing is similarly simple. If two Macs are on the same network they will, if permitted, share printers painlessly and automatically.
Or, at least, that’s the idea and, for several years, it worked in exactly that way until I bought a new wireless router, a Netgear DG834G. It appears that this router does not support the necessary multicasting protocol— the two computers work perfectly if connected over a wired network but not wirelessly. This issue has had me scratching my head for some time. Until tonight.
Graham, on uk.comp.sys.mac, gave me the final piece in the jigsaw. I was aware that the computers were failing to resolve .local addresses and now know, surprisingly courtesy of Microsoft, that NetInfo manager is my friend. Briefly, I needed to edit my hosts file such that kates-imac.local would resolve to that computer’s fixed IP.
