One of the reasons I bought a Mac for myself and my wife is that I could never get printer sharing working between Linux and Windows. I figured if Marina and I both had Macs then the problem would be solved. Unfortunately, I was wrong. While Apple has mostly embraced Bonjour technology there is still one major area that is left out – Apple's Printer Server (e.g. the open source CUPS) which uses its own multicast based discovery solution. When I hooked my USB printer to my OS X box and turned on printer sharing I couldn't get my wife's Mac to see the printer! The problem turned out to be that both my wife and I's computers have unique IP addresses that we get from our ISP's DHCP server. Unfortunately the ISP's DHCP server gave us addresses in different subnets! CUPS default configuration does not allow printer sharing between machines that are not on the same subnet. The CUPS configuration can be overridden fairly trivially but I don't want to because it would either mean hard coding in my wife's IP address (which changes) or allowing the whole world to print on my printer (which I'd rather not). Thankfully there was a really trivial solution to the problem that was pointed out to me by Stuart Cheshire, the father of Bonjour.
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