Wifi MacBooks intermittant connectivity to wired Bonjour printers

[Mang]

Hi everyone - last week we updated MRs and MSs to:

MR 31.1.5.1

and

MS 17.1.4

Not sure if it's related, but ever since then our Bonjour printers are randomly offline, online, offline etc.  For example right now I can see 3 of the 20 printers in the building.  All of the printers are wired and on the same VLAN as my MacBook.  Clearing mDNS changes the list of available printers but still doesn't show all of them.  When I take my laptop to another area of our building, that list changes as well.

I have made not configuration changes and rebooted almost all of our devices.  Appreciate any thoughts.

[meraki-chris]

hi @Mang - MR 31.1.6 has fixes for mDNS and bonjour related services - you might give it a try to see if it resolves the issue you're facing. 

[Mang]

Thanks, I just did this upgrade so we will see how it goes tomorrow!

[Mang]

Unfortunately upgrading to 31.1.6 didn't help.  There are roughly 35 printers on the subnet that my laptop is on and only 2 or showing up in System Settings > Printers > Add printer (MacOS).  Is it relevant that this problem begins as soon as our 1000 students (and their ipads) are in the building?  Their devices are on a different subnet, however their printer list is hit and miss as well.

[dmiss]

We've had this issue last school year as well, but we don't allow student printing so it only affected our operations folks who use iPads primiarly. I rolled back firmware on our aps, rebooted, factory reset, and nothing. We ultimately had to install the HP print app on the ipads, and that worked. But this school year, we had a issue related to bonjour once we upgraded our macs to Sequoia. Ours were that our printing was very very slow, to the point where once a job was submitted, it would spin for 1min+ before the job went through. There seems to be an issue with Bonjour forwarding and the new OS. We ultimately had to disable bonjour forwarding on our Faculty ssid to our printer vlan.

I'm leaning that there may be something going on with Meraki Bonjour forwarding and apple products. We have had an apple ticket open for months, but haven't gotten very far.

[Mang]

Thanks for your message - I have a case open with Meraki, but no resolution yet.  It's pretty strange - no school today again, so the printers are showing up just fine.  Not doing any bonjour forwarding here as my MacBook is on the same vlan.  What's even more strange is that whatever is happening is affecting both our student and employee vlans.  Everything was working great until upgrading firmware last week.