How do I get the IP Address?

[vickishome]

I have a small network between 5 computers. They all share one printer through a router. It is an ethernet printer.

Since I just installed Jag, I'm having to reinstall my printer PPD and set up Print Center. I noticed that one of the options is "IP Printing." I know what my IP Address is on my Macs, but how do I figure out what it is on the printer?

The printer works with Appletalk printing, but since it's an ethernet printer, I thought IP Printing might be better (don't ask why - I'm obviously clueless here - IP Printing just seemed more... ethernet like! LOL! :D).

If I could just figure out what the printer's IP Address is, I could enter that info into Print Center and see if it would print. So far, guessing (by incrimenting the last digit by 1) has failed to work. Or should I give up on using IP Printing and just use Appletalk?

[vickishome]

Looks like I'll use AppleTalk printing. This info appears to be old, but I doubt it's changed much. It appears there are some advantages to using AppleTalk printing over IP Printing.

http://www.palomar.com/Printing/PrintingTCP.html

Limitations

While this printing solution is useful for offices that have many workstations connected to one printer it also has its drawbacks.

1. The biggest problem is the lack of printing status. When there is a printer connection via AppleTalk the user is notified of printing problems as they occur. But with a TCP/IP connection the user is blind to these problems. This means that if the printer is out of paper or a paper jam has occurred, the desktop printer will not notify you of the error.

2. Both an advantage and disadvantage is that by default, anyone, anywhere can print to a TCP/IP printer. A firewall is necessary to maintain the security of a network to prevent unwanted users from accessing IP addresses within a network; otherwise, anyone who knows the IP address of your printer can use up your supplies.
I should have never doubted the old, trusted AppleTalk. :)

[hayne]

Your router knows the IP address of the printer. Most routers have some way to get reports - often via a web page. So that is one way you could find out the IP address of the printer.

Another, more general way might be to use a network-mapping tool such as InterMapper (demo version works for 1 hour):
http://www.dartware.com/intermapper/

And as to the issue of your printer being available for unauthorized use over the Internet, that is true whether or not you use IP printing on one particular machine or not - unless you disable IP printing on the printer itself. But this is not an issue for you since presumably your router is acting as a firewall.

[vickishome]

Well, that helps to explain why I don't know how to get my printer's IP Address. The website for the router never worked. I couldn't get it to work using the Macs or PCs. I meant to call their tech support about it, but never got around to it as I never had a pressing need. So I have no idea what information that website was supposed to give me. For those interested, it's an SMC Barricade router. I told hubby I wanted a Linksys. He bought the SMC because his @%#$ Windoze PCs had to have a print server. :rolleyes: But I digress. :p

Thanks for the recommendation for InterMapper. I gave it a try, and it gave me all of the IP Addresses on my network which enabled me to find the IP Address for the printer. :)

Still, I want to stick with AppleTalk. Not because of the security issues, but because of the print status feedback available when using AppleTalk that the webpage I reference above mentioned.

[hayne]

Well, it seems that you can use the print server feature of the SMC Barricade from OS X according to this Mac OS X Hint:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20020930060410464
and a reader report at Macintouch:
http://www.macintouch.com/wirelesslanreader13.html#jan3

What problems did you have with the SMC Barricade configuration web pages?
I haven't heard of such problems. How did you configure the router if you couldn't get to the web pages from either PCs or Macs?

[vickishome]

When I went to the url given in the docs and entered the info the docs told me to enter, I received an error page. My husband tried it on his PC, and he got the same error page. We tried it on all 5 computers (2 Macs, 3 PCs) running (at the time) 4 different operating systems. At first, I thought the page was down temporarily, but after trying it a handful of times over the course of several months, it was clear that the info in the docs was wrong or the website just did not work. If I had called their tech support, I'm sure the problem could have been cleared up, but as I mentioned, the call got put off because there was never really any need to access the website.

As far as how we hooked it up... well... We put the router on the shelf, plugged in the ethernet cables, turned on the computers and told them to use the ethernet connectionm and then everything worked! :D What can I say? It all worked straight from the box. :p

I'll take a look at the hints you posted. Maybe I'm missing out on something good. :)

[vickishome]

Interesting hints! I'm not having any problems printing, but I did find the last comment on that first hint you posted to be rather interesting. I tried the url mentioned, and to my surprise, it worked! It showed my printer right there on the website! It even had some of the printer's features online! I know nothing about CUPS, but maybe I should check it out? How did it figure out what printer I had? Clicking the test page also worked. It's a little freaky since I never set it up to work with CUPS or Gimp or anything. I just plugged it into the router, and this is what I'm getting. So this means anyone and everyone can see what printer I have when I visit their website (if they have it set up to look for my printer info). This is interesting.

After seeing that webpage work for me, I thought I'd try the SMC website again. I finally found the docs, and tried the url again. It's sending me to a login page, but the instructions tell me to leave the password blank (that's supposed to be the default). I do as instructed, and then I'm taken to an error page. It's not a page saying it's a bad password. It just said an error occurred. I always figured SMC had an error in their code for that page.

I decided to call SMC, and after waiting 30 minutes (with the worst hold music ever, but at least it was toll-free and real live tech support on a Saturday), I reached tech support. She told me how to reset the router. After doing that, I am now able to login on the SMC website. :)

So now I'm going to check out all of the cool configuration stuff I've been missing out on. Thanks for the hints which led me to all of this! :)

[hayne]

Originally posted by vickishome
I did find the last comment on that first hint you posted to be rather interesting. I tried the url mentioned, and to my surprise, it worked! It showed my printer right there on the website! It even had some of the printer's features online! I know nothing about CUPS, but maybe I should check it out? How did it figure out what printer I had? Clicking the test page also worked. It's a little freaky since I never set it up to work with CUPS or Gimp or anything. I just plugged it into the router, and this is what I'm getting. So this means anyone and everyone can see what printer I have when I visit their website (if they have it set up to look for my printer info). This is interesting.

I'm guessing that you are referring to the http://127.0.0.1:631 URL that was mentioned in the last comment. The numeric IP address 127.0.0.1 is known as "localhost" - i.e. it is an address which indicates the local machine. It is like saying "here" when someone asks where do you live. When you enter that address in your browser, you are communicating with the software that is running on your own machine. CUPS is on by default in recent versions of 10.2 and 631 is the port that it is listening at. Since that's its job, it is no big surprise that it knew about your printer. This info is not available to anyone else on the wide Internet unless you allow access to your machine from there. Your router's firewall stops that. But it is likely that you can access this CUPS page from other machines on your local network. (Try it with the IP address of your machine in place of the 127.0.0.1 - your machine's address on the local network is probably something like 192.168.xxx.xxx)

[vickishome]

Thank you for the explanation. Yes, you guessed right; I was referring to http://127.0.0.1:631. I thought I was reasonably aware of the info I'm broadcasting to others while I surf the net, but having my last print jobs appear before my eyes on what appeared to be a website was something I was not expecting to see at all. While I'm not printing anything top secret, I don't think it's anyone's business what printer I have, what features I have loaded on it, or what files I've printed lately. However, I also realize that my concern is most likely due to my ignorance of how this information is found and presented to me.

I noticed that port 631 was specified in the url. I also noticed that the url SMC sent me to for my router configurations did an instant redirect to include port 88. So what if I took one of the urls on my website and did a redirect to include port 631. Would I be able to grab the printing info from people's computers when they hit the redirected url? I certainly would never do something like this, but I'd like to know if it can be done.

I also noticed that CUPS was able to pull up a history of my print jobs. Where on my computer is my printing history being kept?

But it is likely that you can access this CUPS page from other machines on your local network. (Try it with the IP address of your machine in place of the 127.0.0.1 - your machine's address on the local network is probably something like 192.168.xxx.xxx) Yes, you are currect about 192.168.xxx.xxx, but I'm not sure I understood your comment here. If I enter http:/<router's IP address>, I'm taken to the SMC website in which I had experienced problems until I called their tech support yesterday. This is the url that instantly redirects me to the same url, but with port 88 added.

I'm obviously missing something here as both of these urls are showing me a screen on my browser that appears to be a website, but is grabbing info from my computer and displaying it back to me. I'm not sure what's actually being broadcast over the internet and what's remaining local. I'm not sure how to explain the info I'd like to know.

Let me try it this way. When going to the CUPS url http://127.0.0.1:631, I'm presented with a screen which includes this image at the top: http://127.0.0.1:631/images/navbar.gif. I ran a search on my hard drive, and navbar.gif is not there. So that image had to have come from the CUPS website. Where is the "html file" that causes the CUPS page to display to me? Is it on my computer on at the CUPS website? A reverse DNS for 127.0.0.1 says it's localhost. But navbar.gif isn't found on my computer. I'm confused.

[yellow]

Greetings!

I'm coming into this threat a tad bit late, but I hope I can offer a bit of advice and insight. There are some dependencies here when dealing with lp (TCP/IP) printing on a printer. If your printer was manufactured in the last couple of years it's probably set up for DHCP (dynamic host control protocol) as a default. What this means is that the printer begs an IP address of a DHCP server as soon as it gets on the wire. If no such animal exists, then the printer will be IP-less (default address set to 0.0.0.0). I suspect that you have an Apple printer (which they stopped manufacturing a few years back); so setting up an IP address on it should be no problem. Use the Apple Printer Utility that is easily downloadable from Apple's site*, with this utility, you can set the printer's hostname, IP address, netmask, gateway, as well as it's AppleTalk name. I would suggest following this up with a quick trip to the terminal app to telnet to the printer and give it some sort of administrative password and finish up any configuration that you need to do. If it's not an Apple printer, the manufacturer surely has a similar application that can be downloaded to get to the printer and specify the address. The long and the short of it is, if you want IP printing on that printer, most likely you will have to specify manually what you want the printer's address to be at the printer. After that, you shouldn't have any troubles at all setting up your Macs (and PC) to do IP printing to this printer. Please feel free contact me if you require clarification or additional help.

As for your queries about http://127.0.0.1:631, as someone noted earlier, 127.0.0.1 is the IP equivalent of the DNS name localhost which roughly means my local computer networking before it goes out on the "network" (sounds strange huh?). What this is doing is pointing your web browser to go to the address 127.0.0.1 at port 631 to see what's there. This is the port for IPP [ipp 631/tcp IPP (Internet Printing Protocol)], a protocol that is running a daemon (UNIX speak for an 'app' that listens on a port for specific connections that require a specific action. Other daemons probably running on your computer right now, netinfod, lookupd, ntpd, inetd, etc). So this is just an application that is running waiting for (amongst other things) a connection from your web browser to dispense info about the printing structure. On another note: Navbar.gif does indeed exist on your computer (/usr/share/doc/cups/images/navbar.gif), it's just in an invisible directory that the regular Mac OS X user (with no UNIX experience) really doesn't need to be seeing. If you do the search again, go to the add criteria select bar, select visibility, and set it to all, then you will find it.

Cheers,

Jacques

* [ http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Apple_Software_Updates/English-North_American/Macintosh/Printing/LaserWriter/Apple_Printer_Utility_2.2.img.bin ]

[vickishome]

Thank you! That helps me understand it much better. :)

I have been running Jag for just over 24 hours, and had missed the 'visibility' tab in the new file find. I had used TinkerTool to turn visibility on, and erroneously thought doing so would make the finder see the files as well. I will keep the visibility tab turned to 'all' from now on as it burns me up that the Finder is hiding things from me. It's hard to connect the dots when half of them are invisible.

No Apple printer here. I have a Minolta-QMS Magicolor 3100 (http://www.minolta-qms.com/products/color/mc3100/index.html) (great printer, btw). It's less than a year old, and I'm sure it uses DHCP. I'll look for a utility that will allow me to see the IP Address (although the Minolta-QMS docs keep referring to the "network administrator" who, in this case, is ME, and I have almost NO info and no prior experience to go on).

Back to the article I found and referenced above... Since the printer is working great using AppleTalk, is there any reason to switch to IP Printing? The article I referenced above said switching to IP Printing would lose the feedback from the printer, such as notices when the printer is out of paper, etc. The printer prints very quickly as the communications are going through the ethernet cable regardless of whether I print with AppleTalk or IP Printing. Is there an advantage to switching to IP Printing that I'm not enjoying while using AppleTalk? From the little bit I've learned about it, it seems I have nothing to gain and a few things to lose by switching from AppleTalk to IP Printing.

[yellow]

The software that came with the printer should have some sort of control software included.

IP printing is faster. It's universal.

Appletalk is much easier to deal with, but your PC has to have that protocol installed in order to print to it. If it's an NT or 2000 (and probably XP too) it can print via Appletalk.

The only real problem I can see for the long run is that Appletalk is going away. Apple is already moving away from it and leaving pieces/parts in as an afterthought for legacy networks. In the next couple years, I seriously doubt that the Appletalk protocol will be supported at all. For now, however, I don't think you'll have much to gain from switching your printer to TCP/IP.

The thing with DHCP is that if there's no DHCP server on your network providing addresses it won't work for you. It's possible that your little router IS providing them which means the printer has an address. If there's a control panel on the printer, then you should be able to print out a config page and the IP address will be on it.

Jacques

[hayne]

Originally posted by vickishome
I noticed that port 631 was specified in the url. I also noticed that the url SMC sent me to for my router configurations did an instant redirect to include port 88. So what if I took one of the urls on my website and did a redirect to include port 631. Would I be able to grab the printing info from people's computers when they hit the redirected url?
Not unless they had modified CUPS to allow remote administration. By default, CUPS only provides web-page administration to the local machine. If you try accessing the CUPS web page from another machine, it won't work.

What I was suggesting earlier was to try accessing the CUPS web page from another machine on your local network - e.g. from one of your husband's Windows machines. Suppose your Macintosh address is 192.168.x.y, then go over to your husband's machine and type the following URL into a web browser there:
http://192.168.x.y:631
(but using the actual address of your Macintosh instead of 192.168.x.y)
I now know that this won't work (you will get something like "page not found") since CUPS is only allowing access from the local machine (via 127.0.0.1).

How did I find out that CUPS only allows access from the local machine?
Answer: I used the command 'lsof' in the Terminal as follows:
sudo lsof -i :631
You need to use 'sudo' (which will prompt you for your administrator password) since only administrators are allowed to get full details from 'lsof'.
The "-i" option shows Internet sockets.
The output from this command was:
COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
cupsd 303 root 0u inet 0x02274a4c 0t0 TCP localhost:ipp (LISTEN)
cupsd 303 root 2u inet 0x0214eb10 0t0 UDP *:ipp

which told me that CUPS is only listening for TCP requests (as from a web browser) when they come from the local machine.
You can see the availability of all the Internet stuff if you use 'sudo lsof -i' (i.e. omit the ":631" from the previous command)

Finally, while you are in the Terminal, you might want to check out the 'locate' command. It shows you where on your disk are files matching (or partially matching) the filename you type in.
locate navbar.gif
on my system shows me the location of several navbar.gif files.
This command uses a database which gets updated by a 'cron' job every week - so it won't show you any files which have only been added recently. And your machine has to be on & awake during the night when this updating is scheduled to happen or else the database won't get updated. (I use MacJanitor to run these maintenance scripts.)

[eravau]

To update the locate database manually (say after you install a buncha stuff and want to go looking for pieces of the install)...run

sudo /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb

from the command line. The sudo part isn't required, but it assures that the database gets the entire hard drive and not just the part to which the use you are presently logged in as has acess.

[vickishome]

I wanted to thank you guys for the information you provided. I had no idea CUPS even existed nor how the information from my printer/router could be displayed on my browser like that. It seems there's always so much new info to learn. :)

I've looked high and low for software for my printer, and it appears Minolta-QMS didn't see fit to develop the software for Macintosh. I'm not at all happy about this. I've looked throughout my CDs and manuals that came with my printer - no software. I looked on the Minolta-QMS website, and it has software listed for downloading -- Windows software (yes, in the Macintosh section). So I called Minolta-QMS asking if their link was wrong. Well, the guy has never seen a Macintosh version of the software. He has put in a message to their software department to confirm that there is no Macintosh version of the software (classic or OS X). He'll email me with their response. But I feel 99.9% certain their going to come back to tell me that there is no Macintosh version to the software. I'm not happy about this. After running Macintosh computers for 18 years, I'm tired of fighting these companies to get off of their backsides to develop Macintosh versions of their software. But I digress.

The guy said I could get the printer's IP address using the menu on the printer so I'll drag out my manuals to figure out how to do that because I should know how to use my printer. However, I'm going to stick with AppleTalk printing for now. It works great, prints extremely fast, and privides me with valuable feedback from the printer. Should Apple discontinue AppleTalk support, I'll revisit the decision at that time. However, unless AppleTalk is interfering with futher development of OS X, I see no reason for Apple to drop AppleTalk support anytime soon. They may not upgrade it, but since it works as it is, I have no need for Apple to improve it. I'm happy to use AppleTalk as it is for as long as Apple continues to offer AppleTalk as an option.

[js62]

Maybe this is too easy but on my lan, the ip's are as follows. The basestation is 10.0.1.1, g4 powermac is 10.0.1.2, ibook is 10.0.1.3, sony playstaion 2 is 10.0.1.4. So wouldn't your network be similar? If I had a network printer it would be 10.0.1.5. So on and so forth. Maybe I'm being too simplistic here I don't know.

[vickishome]

I was able to determine the IP Address using the demo version of InterMapper. But I know that's not the way I should be going about it.

However, in reference to your question. InterMapper shows my network as having 1, 2, 11, 24, and 25 as the last digits in the IP Addresses. I have a hub connected to the router which may be why the IP Addresses aren't in sequence? Clearly, I have a lot to learn in this area.

[vickishome]

Now I'm getting IP Addresses running out my ears! Okay, let's see if I understand any of this IP Address info yet. Is any of this right?

I buy a router. By default, it should normally have the IP Address of 192.168.x.y. Mine turns out to be 192.168.2.1. Where did the "2" come from? Does it have any significant meaning? I suppose the "1" is because it's the first step in the network, right?

So then I connect stuff to that router. I tell it to use DHCP so it (??) goes around assigning IP Addresses to everything connected to the router. I ran IPNetMonitorX (http://www.sustworks.com/site/prod_ipmx_overview.html), and it gave me this information (so helpful to have the names next to the IP Addresses!!):
Address Sent Rcvd Seconds Comment
192.168.2.1 Sent Received 0.002 00-04-E2-29-92-5E SMC Networks, Inc.
192.168.2.2 Sent Received 0.000 localhost
192.168.2.11 Sent Received 0.001 00-05-02-5E-73-42 APPLE COMPUTER
192.168.2.24 Sent Received 0.000 00-B0-D0-19-5D-90 Dell Computer Corp.
192.168.2.25 Sent Received 0.000 00-50-BF-E4-97-4B MOTOTECH INC.
So .1 is my router, as expected.
.2 is my G4 which I was using when I did the IP scan so it's coming up as "localhost".
.11 is my G3.
.24 is my husband's Dell.
And .25 is my children's PC.

So where is my printer?!

It turns out whenever I turn on my printer, it spits out a startup page. That startup page tells me the Printer's IP Address. It says it's 161.033.128.024. Where did this IP Address number get assigned to the printer? Did the manufacturer assign that IP Address? Is that a default of some kind like 192.168.x.y is for routers? Can I change it to something else? Is it permament unless I change it (even if I turn the printer on/off - even if I moved it to a different network)? Does this also mean that the printer is not using DHCP?

And why isn't this printer showing up in the IP Address scan I ran which shows everything else connected to the router? Why did DCHP assign non-consecutive numbers (.11, .24 and .25)? Is it random each time I turn on the router or connect something to it?

Am I giving everyone a headache yet? :p

[eravau]

After a quick google for the printer's IP address, I found out from this PDF (http://www.qms.com/support/prthlp/2060pdf/393fmca6.pdf) that 161.033.128.024 is indeed the default IP address that the manufacturer assigns to QMS printers. The PDF linked above outlines the procedure needed to set your printer's IP address (Might I recommend 192.168.2.3 or something nearby).

The reason IPNetMonitorX could not see the printer is because it's not on the same IP sub-net as your G4 (192.168.2.x). And since it doesn't want to search every IP on the Internet for your printer, it stops at your local sub-net. Besides, people would get upset if you went probing their networks.

192.168.x.y is set as the default on most routers because that address space is reserved as internal-network only addressing...and therefore cannot overlap with or mess up any public internet addressing. There are other private address spaces as well, but this one is probably the most popular and most used.

In general (but not always), x.y.z.1 is your router's address...where x, y and z are the first three parts of your computer's IP address.

As for why you have seemingly random IP assignments on your network, I'm not sure why that is. I couldn't find anything saying that SMC routers assign IP addresses randomly in the manual I looked at. There are Barricate router manuals on the individual pages linked from here (http://www.smc.com/index.cfm?sec=Support&pg=Product-Downloads&cat=4&site=c).

[vickishome]

Thank you! It appears you found the manual for the software Minolta-QMS did not make for Macintosh. Maybe I'll have to borrow my husband's Dell to play with it. I would like to change the IP Address on the printer.

I started doing searches on the internet about IP Addressing and found quite a few interesting sites to look into more deeply. I think it's time I learn more about this. Maybe I can find some good books on the subject.

Thanks for everyone's help! :)