Let OSX handle it

I spent a few days away from the office, visiting parents for birthdays and Mothers' Day holidays. Which means that I got to work with their computers and not mine for a while.

My parents have a collection of computers. Some are Macs running OSX, some are PCs running Linux, and one is a PC running Windows XP. Our goal was to share printers. Easier said than done, as the printer configurations eluded us. One printer on an Apple Airport Express would work from a Mac with "Leopard" but not on the Mac with "Snow Leopard". Three printers on the Linux PC would work from Linux but not from any of the Macs. (We didn't try anything from Windows.)

We did get things working. It seems that we were trying too hard. We were manually configuring printers on the Macs (and must have picked a wrong option somewhere). We removed our printer definitions, executed the line 'cupsctl BrowserPreference="cups dnssd"' and the Macs then found the published printers and picked the right drivers automatically. No muss, no fuss!

Sometimes its better to let the operating system handle things.