Between what I'd read in the past few days and the memory of sundry traumas times past, I was not completely nonplussed when my venerable battlewagon of an HP LaserJet 6MP went AWOL from the printer roster this time out, and did not appear when called by name. I've had printer functionality break bigtime in the course of a couple of previous upgrades. My setup's already a little dicey, because there are two black boxes—the router and a so-called "JetDirect EX Plus" adaptor— strung along the queue of electrons passing back and forth between printer and iMac. About two minutes of research revealed that the printer could be fetched back from Upgrade Valhalla by invoking its True Name (or "IP address" as the mages call it), and three minutes more that in this configuration the 6MP would speak its True Name should the supplicant make a mystical gesture with the tip of his forefinger, depressing the "Test" button on the holy JetDirect EX Plus.

This was done, and that was done, and that too, and the spirit of the absent LaserJet was duly summoned from the vasty deep by means of the "Gutenprint 5.2.3" driver already present somewhere in the bowels of the Library here. Total elapsed time between first attempt to print coming a-cropper and Rand's horase cries of "Eureka!" frightening the parakeets < 10 minutes.

cord-ially,