Joe FahsMar 14
Craig Hockenberry

Hundreds of hours and thousands of words to understand and fix a crappy Bonjour implementation. This was a helluva rabbit hole.

If you have a Canon printer that's constantly going “Offline”, you’ll want to read this:

https://furbo.org/2026/03/14/your-mac-and-a-canon-printer/

Your Mac and a Canon Printer • furbo.org

Our trusty Brother MFC laser printer and scanner was getting long in the tooth and my wife wanted color printing. After a lot of research, she landed on the Canon MF644Cdw and placed an order. Initially, we were both happy with the new printer. The print quality is great, the hardware is solid, and the […]

Furbo.org by Craig Hockenberry
Mar 14 at 7:33pmIvory for Mac
Show threadMatthias Mar 14
@chockenberry Do you think that could mess up other bonjour devices (HomePods) on the network?
Show threadCraig HockenberryMar 14
@Mpwg That's exactly what it's doing via the Bonjour Sleep Proxy (which runs on Apple TV, HomePods, and Airport devices - things that are “always on”).
Show threadMichael BishopMar 14

@chockenberry I was wondering if you tried the dnd-sd flag which allows you to advertise *on behalf of* a service that doesn’t support Bonjour. Maybe with the static-ip, you could turn off Bonjour on the printer, but still advertise the printer and scanner’s service manually.

If you wanted to try it, look at the -R flag on the man page.

Sorry you are having this problem.

Show threadCraig HockenberryMar 14

@mbishop That’s an interesting idea that I hadn’t considered. There would need to be manual coordination with the process and the real world (eg. kill it when printer is turned off).

But the most important thing is that it can be done by normal people: explaining a static IP was hard enough 😀

Show threadJeff Zugale - Z FactoryMar 14
@chockenberry wow, that’s bizarre! And I’m one of these people. I’ve learned to just delete and reinstall the printer anytime this happens but it’s interesting to learn the true reason. I’ll be switching mine to a static IP shortly! Thanks. 😊
Show threadSteve WingardMar 14
@chockenberry I’ve struggled with this a few times myself. Time to dig into eero settings and figure out how to convince it that I know what I’m doing…
Show thread((Jann Gobble)) 🏳️‍🌈Mar 14
@chockenberry Whew! Luckily my Canon G6020 is not exhibiting this behavior!!! Thanks for posting so I could check to see that it is okay.
Show threadMatt GoddenMar 15
@chockenberry Would assigning the printer a fixed IP address from the router’s DHCP, based on the printer’s MAC address achieve the same effect? Then the printer wouldn’t need its settings altered.
Show threadCraig HockenberryMar 15

@metaning Probably. I wrote these instructions for someone who barely knows what a static IP is.

No way I’m explaining how to do it with UniFi 😉

Show threadMatt GoddenMar 15

@chockenberry Fair enough, I hadn’t thought a router could be worse than a printer in terms of interacting with its settings ;)

I came to the conclusion long ago, most devices work better when they think they have dynamic IPs, but most networks work better when nothing has dynamic IPs. And thus DHCP Static for everything.

Show threadScott JannMar 15
@chockenberry I'm not the only one! I've had my Canon MF743Cdw on a static IP for ages and it still goes offline every few days, my solution was to reboot it nightly, I set up a cron job to do it via curl https://gist.github.com/zenwheel/eadb3adb2488929a2a7ed15f64c57251
Reboot Canon Printer

Reboot Canon Printer. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

Gist
Show threadCraig HockenberryMar 15

@zenwheel Wow. I’ve always wondered if “eco mode” would screw up the network interface or ipp server. The whole thing feels super fragile.

Thanks for the script, I hope I don’t have to use it 😀

Show threadNate Vack 🍴Mar 16
@chockenberry Another truly horrible solution to this problem would be to turn its networking off entirely and plug it in to a Raspberry Pi via USB