I’m desperate for some advice. Upgrading to Sequoia has broken printing for our entire household. We got a, now old but very functional and very good Phaser 6180MFP duplex printer connected by ethernet to one of our Eero 6e routers. Rock solid for years, more system upgrades than I can remember, but this last one… There’s discussion online about local network permissions being an issue, but I can find nothing actionable in that. (There’s no app to enable in Privacy & Security: Local Network, for example). It seems like no connection is being opened to the printer at all. I can no longer go to the printer’s IP in a Safari window, for example. That’s never been an issue. I’m at a loss. Any ideas/suggestions? We can still print from an MBA still on Sonoma. Sequoia seems to be the only variable.
Have you looked to see if it is a Airprint Printer?
If Mac firewall is on, try turning it off.
No. It predates Air Print and cannot broadcast WiFi. I think it’s well over 10 y/o. This is why we wire it to a router, so we can, in theory, print over Wi-Fi.
No firewall is on.
Someone suggested we see if we could SHARE the printer from a Sonoma Mac. We have one currently. That worked, but it’s not perfect to say the least, since we’ll have to keep the ancient MBA (wife’s old computer) as a print server. But it’s better than nothing.
Have you tried adding it again in the Printer and Scanners pane under Sequoia? I know in the past, I had some issues with my Samsung laser printer and that worked although I had to connect it first to USB to configure it. If yours has USB, you might check your documentation to see if that is possible.
I have a 20+ year old Brother laser printer that is connected via Ethernet to my router. After upgrading one of my Macs to Sequoia, I needed delete the printer in System Settings and then reinstall the old printer driver. Fortunately, the OS X 10.10 Yosemite driver for that printer still works. After reinstalling the driver, the printer worked again. Not sure if that will work for you, but good luck!
As @josehill suggests, it could just be that you need to set up the printer from scratch. I’ve had to do that in the past with a no-frills HP LaserJet at work when I upgraded to Catalina (? or Mojave?). But I would suggest first checking if it’s a software problem or a network problem.
If you can, try hooking it up to your Mac directly (using one of these if you have one lying around). If that works, then you know you have a network issue to deal with. If that doesn’t work, chances are you just need to re-install drivers as @josehill suggested. I prefer to know which route to go before I start doing one or the other. Checking if you can print locally should answer that question.
Reinstalling the drivers sounds like a great suggestion. I’ve deleted the previous printer in Settings: Printers & Scanners. I’ve got the installer directly from Xerox --that macOS REALLY does not want me to run – but after finally getting it to run (“Open anyway…”), it fails at the last moment after appearing to deliver its payload. I don’t know whether it’s yet some other security feature that goes beyond the usual permissions and restrictions that lead you to have to click the “Open anyway” button, or if it’s another incompatibility. So disappointing. (sigh)
…and I was able to print by sharing the printer from a Sonoma Mac, which is “fine” if the Sonoma Mac is on and awake. So it’s capable of printing, for what that’s worth. I don’t think this printer, which is really more of an enterprise product, has any USB. Just Ethernet.
Check that is is using LPR, not IPP.
When that happens, check your Security pane to see if the app needs permission to launch. It could be a helper app running in the background that’s not being launched.
Maybe you could also try to add the printer back using a generic driver that MacOS offers to install.
The previous printer I set up (that worked for years) was using LPD to the printer’s IP address. I can now no longer set up new printers, because the computer can’t open a connection to the printer.
Trying to run the 6180MFP-D installer requires Privacy & Security open, because it won’t run at all unless and until you click the “Open anyway” dialog button that appears when you try to launch and the System seems to say “DANGER”. Anyway, after proceeding to run the installer, it fails:
“The installation failed.
The Installer encountered an error that caused the installation to fail. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance.”
There is no further info in the Privacy & Security window. I’ve tried dealing with Xerox support in the past for a macOS system upgrade question, and it was unhelpful in the extreme. I’m not enthusiastic about trying. I can try Apple, but decades of experience suggests asking for help “with a 3rd party product” isn’t likely to be productive, but may still be worth a try.
I poked around the installer packages provided by Xerox for macOS 10.10 and 10.11. There are scripts in there that want to determine if you’re running on macOS 10.7 or later. The logic that they’re using to determine the version of macOS is only is focusing on the minor version number.
They don’t do anything with the major version number. I used the same commands on macOS15 that they use in their scripts and the minor version comes back as 0. That looks like it could trigger the installation script to fail because the minor version number for macOS 15 is less than 7. The macOS version detection they used in their installation script was broken by macOS 11 and later.
Ouch. This is starting to look very ugly. It’s likely to be an involved science project for manually playing installer, extracting the driver components, placing them in the “right” areas, and then stitching together how these components work with the macOS/CUPS printing system.
Spit-balling here…
Might it be easier to leave a Mac that’s working at it’s current OS level and then use printer sharing to print from the Sonoma-upgraded Mac to the Mac where the printer is still working?
I don’t share your hope about asking Apple for help on this. What you have is an abandonware driver from a third party – never updated for the latest macOS versions. If Xerox doesn’t want to help, then you’re probably going to be at the mercy of the user community.
On Reddit I found this discussion for installing a driver for a Xerox Phaser printer on Big Sur. You might try the same steps in Sequoia, substituting the driver for your model for the one used in the example.
Good luck!
Not great for our wasteful society but, irritatingly, it might be time for a new printer! In any case, mechanically, it might not be all that reliable in future.
I have two older printers: an HP 6988 Deskjet which is around 20 years old and a Samsung 2820DW which is around 12 years old and both work fine in Sequoia so the age of the printers is not a factor as long as the drivers support them. Cartridges are still available for many of these older models.
As I said before, I would try a generic driver and see if that works or as the OP said, just connect to the computer that does work with it and share it which is probably the easiest method.
According to the specs, it does have USB 2.0 so you could try to connect directly as I said before and see if it can be set up. Updated drivers might be available:
10/100Base-TX Ethernet, USB 2.0, Parallel, Optional: multiprotocol network card, wireless network adapter
The Phaser 6180MFP is a great printer, and it supports real (not emulated) PostScript and PCL. I would not be quick to get a new printer, especially if it has a lot of life left in its toner cartridges.
Since the printer still works on your Sonoma Mac, the printer definitely is not the problem. At a bare minimum, you absolutely should be able to set it up as an LPD printer using the Generic PostScript or Generic PCL driver options, though you may lose access to some tray management features and scanning features.
The problem almost certainly lies with Sequoia’s increasingly complicated, fragmented, and obscure security settings that can make enabling basic functions a real challenge.
The first thing I would try to do is to determine if it is a system-level networking issue vs an app/driver-specific issue. For example, I presume you know the correct IP address of the printer. Are you able to “ping” the printer’s address via the Terminal.app command line? If not, are you able to ping other devices on the local network? Are you able to “ping” the printer’s address from the Sonoma Mac? (Since you can print from the Sonoma Mac, you almost certainly should be able to ping the printer from there. This basically is a sanity check that you have the right address.) If you can ping the printer from the Sequoia Mac, the problem is at the app/driver level.
I suggest checking again for helper apps in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Local Network, looking for apps that might not obviously be labelled “Xerox” or “Phaser” etc. For example, I found a thread about Epson printers failing after updating a Mac to Sequioa, and it was because an Epson app called “rastertoescpll” needed to be granted Local Network access.
With Sequoia’s complexity, I can’t confidently direct you to a specific solution, but I am confident that a solution exists, and it most likely is buried somewhere in the Privacy & Security settings.