There appears to be a compatibility issue with Mac OSX lion and lots of printers.   (Talked about here on the apple support pages)  The printer may or may not work properly, but you will get an error that says “The optical photoconductor needs to be replaced.”

When I try to print on my new Fuji Xerox document C4350 last week I got an error saying “The optical photoconductor needs to be replaced.” and the printer would not even print.  If you play around with a different print setting (e.g. USB, Jetdirect, LPD, IPP) you may be able to get the printer working (still with the error!) till Apple repairs the problem. Here’s how I got my Xerox printer working.

How to get a Fuji Xerox Printer working with OSX Lion

I just purchased a Fuji Xerox Docuprint C4350, and there have been a couple of issues getting it running.

1. Installing the Drivers

The 1st issue is that the Fuji Xerox drivers from the website do not run under Lion, they are PPC code which means you need to have a PowerPC computer or Rosetta to run the installer. The actual PPD files are fine however, so the workaround is to install the drivers onto an older computer (I used my old G4 Powerbook) and then copy them via thumb drive or e-mail onto your new computer.

In my case the file was called “FX DocuPrint C4350 PS.”  The Installer puts it into the Library/Printers folder and you need to move it anywhere on your Lion machine then when you are selecting the driver  choose ‘Other’ and find the file.

2. “The optical photoconductor needs to be replaced.” ERROR

After setting up the IP address on the printer and then selecting the computer to print using IPP printing, whenever I tried to print I would get the error “The optical photoconductor needs to be replaced.” Not only this –  it would pause the printer queue and not print the page! A little Google search shows that this is a common error under Lion.

In my case I found 2 other ways to get the printer working.
The 1st was simply to plug it in by USB instead of Ethernet printing. This gave me no errors at all and the printing works fine, it’s just a bit slower.

The 2nd way was to still use IP printing but select HP Jetdirect – Socket instead of IPP printing. Xerox calls it port 9100 instead of JetDirect so make sure on your Xerox printer you enable port 9100. This still gives the error, but the printer at least prints the page normally.

It doesn’t matter what kind of wireless network you are running at your home,  be it an Apple Airport base station, or one of many other brands like D-Link, Asus, Billion, Netgear, or even a branded one like a Bigpond home wirless network,  they all suffer the problem of network congestion.  By network congestion I mean there are so many other people in your street or block of units with wireless equipment and they all interfere with each other – a bit like lots of people talking together in a crowded room. This  can manifest itself as reduced range on your WiFi network, a drop in speed, your wireless signal dropping out,  or your wireless  signal strength going up and down  randomly. Here’s  how to change your wireless channel so that you won’t clash with the other people around you.

In Australia there are 13 wireless channels in the USA there are only 11. When you go and buy a wireless router and bring it home and plug it in it will default  to one of those channels, most likely the middle one – Channel 6.  If your next door neighbours have done the same thing,  chances are all your wireless networks are on channel 6 and  therefore  they are interfering with each other. This  does not reduce the power that your wireless base station puts out, but it does make it harder to your computer to pick up  the signal because it will be picking up next door’s network as well – it’s a bit like trying to listen to a conversation in a noisy room. The best thing to do is change the channel of your wireless device.   There is a slight complication though,  because although there are 11 channels, they all overlap!  Have a look  at this picture:

wireless channels - click to enlarge

All the 11 channels overlap and so the way to use channels that don’t overlap is to use either channel 1, 6 or 11. It used to be the case  that if you are having trouble on say channel 6 you could just switch to channel 1 or 11 and  find some free space.  But as more and more people go wireless these channels are filling up.  For  an example, look at all the wireless networks where I live. (I have used a ubiqity AirOS on a Picostation to get this information, but you can use an iphone app such as WiFiFoFum or a great app for mac OSX called wifi scanner from here.)

A list of the local wireless networks interfering with my home network!

These are all the signals I get sitting in my lounge room at home! And this is in a rural area  with quite spread out houses!  I’d hate to see what was like living in the city. Notice  that although there are 7 networks, most of them are on channel 1, 6 or 11. So I would be better choosing a channel between these, like  3 or 9. This will overlap with the other channels but it will be better than trying to compete directly with them! All wireless routers come with information on how to choose a different channel –  might be time to dig out the user manual!

A Telstra big pond wireless router

Finding the BEST frequency for your location.

I find the best way to work out  the optimum frequency for your wireless network is by trial and error,  and using a little iPhone utility called WiFiFoFum.

Firstly go into your wireless router – you will need the password for this, and change the Channel to 1.

On the airport base station it  this looks like this under Settings, Airport, Wireless:

Selecting a wireless channel

When you have done this, restart your wireless modem, then measure the signal strength (RSSI) using WiFiFoFum, eg -89.

Change the Channel to 2, then do it again.

You will end up with some results like this:

Channel 1 88-89

Channel 2 92-94

Channel 3 84-87

Channel 4 84-87

Channel 5 82-84

Channel 6 83-85 and so on.

Pick the channel that has the best signal – note that a lower number is better as it is measured in -dB so higher means a weaker signal. For me it was channel 5.

You may want to repeat the test another time and another day  because people can turn their wireless modems on and off at different times in the day.

How do I find my wireless  base station settings?

For most wireless routers  you need to surf to their web page from your browser –  Safari or Firefox. To  do this you need the IP  address of your router. To find it  go into your Apple Menu (top left of your screen) , then  system preferences, then network, then click on Airport, then Advanced, then TCP/IP, then have a look at what it says next to Router:

It will be a number like 10.0.0.138, or 168.0.0.1, or 192.168.1.1 or something similar.

Type that number into Safari as if it were a webpage!

Accessing your wireless router to change the channel

This will take you to your wireless Router page (you will need a password that came with the router – check your documentation)  where you can change the channel settings.

You will need to restart the  wireless router each time you change a setting.

If you  have an Apple AirPort base Station you don’t need to go through Safari, you can just use the ‘ airport admin’  utility in your utilities folder.

This is not really something to set and forget –  because other people might change their settings too!

Telstra are a bit behind the times – their latest offerings of wireless modems don’t work under Snow leopard.
Thankfully it’s only the installer that doesn’t work so here’s how to get the wireless router version of their 3G modem working with Snow Leopard.

You need a web connection (seperate from your new wireless modem) to do this and a bigpond wireless modem.

You cannot put your new big pond username and password into the wireless modem until you have registered that particular wireless modem with your big pond username. The installation CD gets around this but because it doesn’t work in snow leopard, with snow leopard you will need an already existing Internet account to connect to the big pond site and set up your new modem ready for use. Here is how to do it.

1. In system preferences/network/airport  turn on Airport.
2. Connect to your new wireless modem airpirt network using the airport password (WPA) on the small buainesss card that came with the modem. The little wireless bars in the top right of your menu bar should go back to show that you are connected.

3. Open safari and type in 10.0.0.138 where you would type in the web address.  Press return. This will take you to the wireless router page, it should ask you for a username and password. When prompted type admin as the username and admin as the password.

4. On the menus at the top of the page go to diagnostics/ Next G

5. You need to find the imei number and the imsi number. Copy both of these numbers and paste them into text editor or something because you will need them later.

6. Now you need to go to a computer that is connected to the internet and type in this address into the web browser. If you only have one computer, at this point you will need to disconnect from the big pond wireless router and reconnect your old modem and get onto the Internet. When you are connected to the Internet, or using a different computer, go to the following address:

https://register.bigpond.com/hsdpa.do?imei= xxxxxxxx&imsi=yyyyyyyy

(where I have put XXXXX and YYYYY you need to substitute the numbers from step 5 above instead of xxxxxxxx and yyyyyyyy)

What this is doing is manually registering your next G modem with Telstra.

7. You will now appear at a big pond signup page and it will automatically take you through the process to sign up, asking you for an e-mail address, personal details and so on.

8. After you have finished signing up you need to go back into the wireless modem and put your new settings (Username and password) in.

To do this, it’s the same as steps 1 to 3 above, go to 10.0.0.138 and then to next G settings.
Click disconnect, after it disconnects you will be allowed to edit the user name and password.

Enter the username (username@bigpond.com) and the password you used during the online signup process.
CLick Connect – it should not be working

If you have problems:

Ring activations:
137663 2   will tell of the progress of your signup
Or ring tech support 133933 with any problems.

Hopefully Telstra will have this issue resolved soon!

To lodge my e-tax I have to run windows XP on my mac (using Virtual box) but needed to print it via a printer shared from my mac. I assume this will work sharing from any OS X mac to any Windows XP.
Here’s how to do it.

The Overview:

Basically you need to find two settings (Name: and Location:), they are here under printer setup in OSX:

and then you put them in here under windows XP:

It’s not exactly intuitive is it!!!

Here’s the more detailed instructions:

1. In OSX go to APPLE MENU and PREFERENCES and SHARING

2. Click the box that says Printer Sharing to turn on printer sharing.

3. Now go into printer preferences:

4. Click on the printer you want to share and click on ‘Open Print Queue’

5. Click on the little button that says ‘printer setup’

6. Here you find the magic settings – take not of the Name: and the Location:
HINT: you may wish to change them to something short and easy like I have if they are long. You can change them – it doesn’t matter what they are.

Now go into Windows XP.

1. Select Add a printer under Printers:

2. Select add a network printer:

3. The important bit – select ‘connect to this printer’ and type in slash slash location slash inkjet. (Ooh yes don’t you love windows!) like this:

It may ask for your password, but then the printer will appear!
This is windows though, even though the printer appeared, I had to reboot windows for it to actually but it did!