A Geek Goes Flying

Canon MF216n I’ve fortunately never needed to reset my printing system before, but when my macOS Monterey machine suddenly couldn’t send print jobs to the Canon MF216n sitting next to it, both connected to the same switch via Ethernet, I discovered this trick. Even though the Mac could connect to the printer just fine (I could browse to its web interface, the control panel successfully read the toner level, etc), and everything should have worked, I tried to send a simple PDF over the wife and got this, endlessly: Endless “Looking for printer” message in macOS   Frustrating. Following these simple steps ‡ reset the printing system and let me get back to work. (I did have to re-add all of my printers, but since they’re all Bonjour-enabled, that was a minor inconvenience.)

I need to print-to-PDF often, and often from encrypted or otherwise protected PDF forms, for e-filing. CUPS-PDF for OS X used to work, but no longer. My solution is a bit ham-fisted, but it works: I setup a simple CentOS 7 instance under VMware and simply print to that. Steps: Download the Installer and Setup CentOS I used  CentOS-7-x86_64-Minimal-1908.iso  under VMware Fusion 8, with a virtual machine setup with 1GB RAM and a 20GB virtual hard drive, to setup an instance named: CentOS 64-bit Printing.vmwarevm I have it setup to use “bridged” networking (at least initially?) so I can SSH into it, which of course requires sshd to be running (and the installation of some basic stuff the minimal install leaves out): # vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ens33      ONBOOT= yes # ifup ens33 # yum provides "*/ifconfig" # yum install -y net-tools telnet wget vim Install EPEL and CUPS-PDF Browse to  http://download-ib01.f...