In a painful, tedious quest to make my OKI B431dn actually print from a Windows VM I learned several things:
- First and foremost: It really, really helps if your printer doesn’t share the IPv4 address with your TV (even if it’s turned off!)
- Thinking that you can get the IPv6-stacks on embedded devices such as said printer to work is just wishful thinking
- That I (fortunately) didn’t set an admin password for my printer
- That my SAMSUNG TV is still online even on standby
To elaborate: My quest started, because I wanted my Windows 10 VM to print. Easy enough, you’d think, but nothing is as easy as it seems 🙁
Adventure Levels:
- Fight with cups and Windows and encryption (http vs. https). That was a red herring.
- Fight with Samba, shared printers and Windows: another red herring
- Fight with different drivers or PPDs
- Find out that printing via localhost cups is also painstakingly slow
- Eventually figure out that the printer shares the IP with my TV
Solution:
- Change the IPv4-adress of the printer, turn off IPv6 and only use the (now unique) IPv4-adress.
- Use the URLs provided by the printer web page
Remarks:
Still don’t know why printing via IPv6 didn’t work as it should, because the printer’s IPv6-address was pretty unique, but what do I know… Anyway, after applying the solution using the generic cups postscript driver and the installed windows postscript driver, printing started after seconds instead of minutes, so problem solved 🙂