So, if you’re trying to add a shiny new office color laser printer (such as the two Kyocera TASKalfa 5052ci that were delivered to our new building), and you’re running Mac OS X El Capitan, and you get a spinning beachball of doom no matter what protocol you try to connect with, here’s what’s going on and how to fix it.

Let’s say you try to use the LPD protocol. As you type each character of the host name, Apple looks it up in DNS and tries to connect via SNMP to figure out what it is. When you click “Add”, it then uses IPP to query for device options.

This is where it goes to hell. The Mac posts a request using HTTP, and the Kyocera says “that shit’s insecure, call me back on HTTPS”. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. killall AddPrinter

The same thing happens if you try to use IPP directly, or JetDirect, or pretty much any protocol. Works fine on Sierra or High Sierra, blows chunks on El Capitan.

The only fix is to log into the printer and completely disable SSL. Note that it is not sufficient to simply shut off SSL; you must also disable the “Secure Only” feature for every protocol (and probably login to the printer again, since you’ll be killing the HTTPS page that you’re currently logged in through), or it will keep redirecting you to pages that it knows perfectly well don’t exist.

Not a big fan of shutting off SSL, but redirect-to-broken-SSL is worse.

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