Filed under: Cool tools, Productivity, Tips and tricks, Freeware
Try Bonjour on your PC for using Mac printers
It's not a hidden secret, but lots of people simply don't know about it. We mentioned it ourselves more than a year ago in answer to a reader question, but I think it's worth a revisit.Here's my scenario. People show up at the house with PC laptops and want to print something. A boarding pass, an email, a web page. They screw around with Windows control panels trying to find the printers on my Mac network. In my case, they are both shared on a Mac Pro.
Enter Bonjour. It's the Apple answer to zero configuration networking. All you have to do is download Bonjour for Windows. There's also a 64-bit version if you need it.
Once it is downloaded you'll get a Printer Wizard, which will instantly find the printers available on your network, including the shared ones. (Make sure you are sharing them in the Sharing pane of System Preferences.)
Now when your guests want to print, they will be all set. No other drivers are needed. I now keep the Bonjour for Windows .exe on a thumb drive. I hand it to guests, and they are ready to roll.
Bonjour can do more than discover printers. Per Apple:
Bonjour for Windows includes a plugin to discover advertised HTTP servers using Internet Explorer. Click the Bonjour icon in the Internet Explorer toolbar to enable Bonjour browsing. If you have Bonjour devices on your local network with embedded HTTP (Web) servers, they will appear in the list.
It's possible you have a printer that doesn't support Bonjour, but most do. In my case an Epson and a Brother laser printer worked with no glitches. Bonjour requires Windows 2000/2003, Windows XP or Windows Vista.
If only everything in life was this simple.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Marcus said 10:28AM on 7-26-2009
Just how many guests do you get wanting to print stuff?
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Joey said 8:39PM on 7-26-2009
Unlimited. If you want to prevent people from abusing the printer, you should password protect your WiFi network in the first place anyway.
thekevinmonster said 10:30AM on 7-26-2009
There is a downside to Bonjour. The downside is that it is designed to 'just work', and that when it doesn't just work, you may be at a loss to describe why.
Bonjour works over multicast on UDP port 5353. If anything on your network blocks this, Bonjour obviously won't work. So, you'll need to make sure the necessary holes are in firewalls, etc. Bonjour also doesn't really work between subnets well, so if you have a wired network and a wireless network on different subnets, you may be out of luck. The same is true of using a Virtual Machine - you need to make sure it's using bridged networking or Bonjour might not work.
There's also the problem of networking hardware improperly handling multicast traffic. I see this all the time in my job, an endless stream of people who have networks where Bonjour simply isn't functioning despite there being no obvious reasons for failure.
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Rob said 10:41AM on 7-26-2009
The article states "No other drivers are needed". Is this true? Don't you still need the driver for the particular printer?
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CHRiS said 10:57AM on 7-26-2009
You still need the printer drivers, especially a 2nd step if they didn't pay MS to put them on the typical install of Windows already (or its too new). But most of them can be downloaded very easy. This sets up the printer ports and ip address for you, pretty much the biggest hassle of installing printers on Windows.
NixoN said 10:43AM on 7-26-2009
After spending hours unable to successfully share an HP Laserjet via it's built in Ethernet port, using the printer's web configuration to share as a windows printer. I then tried using bonjour and it immediatly, on the first attemp "just worked"..
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Cycomachead said 11:45AM on 7-26-2009
YES!!! For years, before my dad finally got an iMac... I wanted to wirelessly print from my Mac, w/o spending my own cash for a print server.
Mac-to-Mac has always been really easy, and now I can do that. But I've also got a spare PC box (mainly for screwing around...) and I can print so easy.
Windows doesn't get print sharing! Never try it! Just do it from a Mac!
cmsb55 said 2:06PM on 7-26-2009
@ Cycomachead:
I seriously don't understand why you people think Windows has problems with printer sharing. I have never had a problem with it in the years that I have used it. That includes sharing printers on an x86 XP machine and using them from Vista, both x64 and x86, and Ubuntu. It is easy to do and doesn't require extra software to be installed other than drivers sometimes, which still has to be done when using Bonjour. I don't see why people see it necessary to install another program just to do something that is built into Windows.
Peter Kirn said 11:03AM on 7-26-2009
It's worth noting that this isn't just Apple's "answer" to zeroconf -- it *is* a zeroconf implementation. :) So that means that you could have a Linux box running a different zeroconf implementation and still get this benefit, with your Mac happily hopping on with Bonjour. And it's also very cool that Apple has open sourced bit parts of its zeroconf implementations across all three platforms, so even a Java programmer running Linux could take advantage of Bonjour.
That said, yes, it's not *entirely* zero configuration once you get to a different subnet if the firewall intervenes, though don't be too scared, folks - most household networks won't have any problem.
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maccypher said 12:58PM on 7-28-2009
I spend hours and maybe days, trying to configure in a virtual machine (Paralles) can print in a HP wired in a iMac, using Bonjour. In the last try: ou need to make sure it's using bridged networking or Bonjour might not work!!!
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kiwirev said 6:03PM on 7-26-2009
How about trying to get from my Macbook running Leopard to a Samsung CLX-2160 which is connected via USB cable to a PC box running XP. The printer can be seen on the network. If I print to it, the printer whirrs and grinds, but nothing prints. Would loading Bonjour for Windows help with that?
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Eric P said 7:17PM on 7-26-2009
That's a great idea for a followup article. Printing from PC to Mac is super simple thanks to Bonjour, but printing the other way is always a lot harder than it needs to be.
.P@BsLpKn said 4:39PM on 7-26-2009
LOL i just bought an Apple Airport Extreme yesterday....and i found bonjour after i tried the Windows control panel. If only i read this before i might have skipped the cursing and stuff trying to find the printer from my dads netbook XD
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Jason said 8:35PM on 7-26-2009
So what else can you do with Bonjour other than sharing printers?
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Jason said 8:35PM on 7-26-2009
So what else can you do with Bonjour, other than sharing printers?
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Andrew TJ said 9:37PM on 7-26-2009
Bonjour is predominately used as a service discovery mechanism in a lot of OS X software, iPhone apps and some Linux software. It hasn't really broken in to the Windows world. As it's a service discovery mechanism it's difficult to succinctly characterise what it's used in as it's useful (and used in) a wide range of applications.
To give you a real world example, on the network I'm on at the minute there's a Tivo, some printers, a variety of file shares (SMB/AFP/SFTP), SSH, a few iTunes libraries, a few websites and IM Chat being advertised.
There's also a variant called Wide Area Bonjour which as the name implies extends Bonjour to work over the internet. It's pretty neat in that it takes care of port-forwarding and what not making it just as transparent as plain Bonjour. That said, it does require a specially configured DNS server which is a significant barrier to entry for most people.
Joey said 9:50PM on 8-01-2009
You can also do this by connecting the printer to Airport Extreme or Airport Express. This way you don't have to always have a computer running to print.
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Joey said 9:50PM on 8-01-2009
Also, Airport Express works just like a printer server, except it works with any USB printer. For its price, its much cheaper than a "printer server" but also provide many other function, such as a router, a switch, a wireless network extender, and remote audio (from iTunes).
Richard said 10:46PM on 7-26-2009
One must also be aware this in some cases this won't work *at all*. I have an HP LaserJet P1006, connected to a Time Capsule. From Windows, the driver first has to be installed manually. Then, while it will appear to spool a print job, nothing actually gets to the printer.
The problem has to do with having a host-based driver that does all the rendering on the PC side and expects to communicate directly with the printer from the PC and not through a share. To this day I haven't been able to resolve the issue and, by what my Google-Fu has found neither has anyone else.
So never say something works with "every" printer because there is always an edge case out there.
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Chris said 3:00AM on 7-27-2009
"... will instantly find the printers available on your network, including the shared ones."
It'd be a bit of an anti-climax if it couldn't find the shared ones! I am intrigued as to which other ones it can also find though...
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