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Add a Netgear PS110 printserver to Mac OS X Tiger

I've had the new MacBook for three days, and hadn't yet printed out anything. In fact, I hadn't even set up a printer: I print so little that I just didn't think of it. Then I got a fax.

I get in-bound faxes by e-mail. It's a lot easier to delete the junk faxes every morning than to pick up all the paper in front of the fax machine. But when the fax is legit, as this was, I still sometimes need to print them out. This was a purchase order, which needs to be printed to go in the files, so I hit "Print" in Preview and.. whaddya know: no printers defined.

Well, it's certainly not hard to add a printer from the command line, but for the heck of it I chose "Add Printer" within Preview. To my complete surprise, the dialog that came up had a choice for adding a HP JetDirect Socket printer - which is almost what I wanted. I have a little Netgear box here, and the only difference is that HP uses port 9100 and Netgear uses 4010. Well, there are other differences: one of these is a cheap piece of near junk and the other isn't, but sometimes near junk works well enough, doesn't it?

So, feeling adventurous and lucky, I decided to take a chance. I plugged in the address as "10.1.36.221:4010". Honestly, I expected OS X to mung that up and end up with an error or "10.1.36.221:4010:9100" or some nonsense, but amazingly enough, it did the right thing and gave me a socket printer at port 4010. I am impressed!

6 comments

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Sun Apr 6 15:02:13 2008:   Philip


This was fantastically useful. I've had my Macbook Pro for three months and have despaired of being able to print to an HP Laserjet which is networked via a Netgear PS110 print server (I was connected to the printer but the output was gibberish). I was just about to buy a new printer with ethernet connectivity until I found this. Adding the port number to the address solved the problem.



Sun Oct 19 17:32:56 2008:   Ed


Brilliant - this worked straightaway! give this man a medal.



Sun Jan 31 23:24:09 2010:   anonymous


Not enough info: 1 How do you find te Port no., or how do you find at which address netgear is



Mon Feb 1 00:59:33 2010:   TonyLawrence


As the article states, the port is 4010. The address? How would I know what you set it at?





Thu Feb 11 09:44:09 2010:   anonymous


Thanks, I was able to add my HP LaserJet 6L that was connected to my Netgear PS110 by adding the port number to my new iMac.

192.168.0.1:4010

Great instructions!

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