(This goes down as one of those posts you’re saving for your future-self and hope somebody finds it via Google and makes use of it.)
The better part of this weekend was spent unplugged from the grid and unpacking from boxes after our move into our new place. I ended up spending over an hour trying to re-set up our printer, a Lexmark X4550. This printer works wirelessly, which is how it’s always worked for us. However, when we moved, we also bought a new wireless access point and named it something new. This meant the printer didn’t know how to connect to it. Moreover, we didn’t have the USB cable anymore, so we couldn’t reconfigure it using that, either. However, I did manage to finally figure it out, so here’re the rough steps I took to do so:
- On the printer’s control panel, reset the wireless network settings.
- After some time (it seemed to take a couple minutes for me), the printer will create it’s own P2P wireless connection. Look on the printer’s control panel again to see what it named itself (in my case, I think it was “print server 123456”). Connect to this using your Mac.
- Back to the printer’s control panel: Check the IP address of the printer. Open a web browser on your Mac and go to that address.
- Click on Configuration on the left-hand side. Then click Wireless. Set the SSID to your new network’s SSID and change the BSS Type to Infrastructure. Setup whatever security your network has. Click Submit. Now your printer should connect to your network, so reconnect your Mac back to that wireless network.
- Now you have to set up your printer on the Mac. Make sure you have the latest Lexmark drivers from their web site. Open System Preferences, click Print & Fax, click the + icon. The Address is the IP address of your printer (again, can be found from the printer’s control panel). The rest should fill in automatically.
- Here’s the magic part. Open a text-editor (emacs, for instance) and open /etc/cups/printers.conf (you’ll need to sudo open this). For Device URI, replace whatever is currently there (ldp://… or ipp://…) with lexnet3://{ip_address_of_printer}:1
- Save and restart your computer.
You should now be able to print!
