Reconciling Leopard and the Brother 5070N Laser Printer

Once upon a time, I upgraded to Leopard on my Mac Pro, and, though I did not mention it at the time, something in upgrade land totally pissed off my Brother 5070N laser printer.

I'd bought the printer in the first place because it was one of the first to support Bonjour (née Rendezvous, née Zeroconf) networking. With good ol' Tiger, it Just WorkedTM, and all was milk and honey as far as printing went in my home. But noooo, it didn't like the hoity-toity, super-duper-greatest-thing-since-sliced-bread Leopard attitude, and just spat out endless reams of cryptic stack dumps instead of, say, directions to wherever I was in a hurry to leave for. I poked around a little, checking for new drivers and all that sort of common sense stuff, and found that even Brother's website claimed that the drivers were bundled with Leopard and that there was nothing for me to download.

I never did get around to figuring out the problem at the time, and being a sleep-deprived and very busy new dad it unfortunately hasn't been much of a priority. Somehow I've learned to live with six months (!!!) of not being able to print a damn thing. And worse, I've had to hold off on upgrading my wife's machine, which has kept her from being able to enjoy the goodness of automated Time Machine backups.

I finally got fed up with it today and decided to finally sort things out once and for all. I even indulged my inner noob and followed Brother's directions, even though it meant assigning a static IP to my printer and dropping it back from the awesomeness of Bonjour to the semi-awesomeness of old-school IP printing. It turns out that, even though no one says it anywhere, that was the key. So, here's a bit of advice for future Googlers: the 5070N will not print correctly using Bonjour under 10.5. You want the CUPS driver and the "HP Jetdirect - Socket" protocol. Then poof! It's all happy again.

Now to go about breaking upgrading Liz's laptop...