Troubled User With Odd Printer Problem
The user stated that the printer is not printing, and has tried everything they know to get it to work. It just stopped working for no reason.
The print job hung in the print queue on the users desktop computer. I cannot ping the printer. There are no successful replies. The printer network link light is solid, and the activity light is blinking. The printer has a static IP Address of X.X.40.X and a subnet mask of X.X.254.X which it should be X.X.255.X? Does the subnet mask matter for this issue? It depends but let’s be clear. The purpose of the subnet mask is to determine which hosts are on the local network and which are outside of the network. Hosts can talk directly to hosts on the same network, but they need to communicate with a router to talk to hosts on external networks. In this case, it did not matter but I corrected the subnet mask anyway. I set the printer to pull a DHCP address lease. DHCP stands for Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol. In simple terms, DHCP determines if your IP is static or dynamic and the length of time an IP address is assigned. DHCP enabled on your computer simply means you’re letting a DHCP server assign its IP Address. It pulled a different IP Address of X.X.10.X which told me that the printer is in the wrong VLAN. VLAN stands for a virtual LAN (VLAN). It is any broadcast domain that is partitioned and isolated in a computer network at the data link layer (OSI layer 2). VLAN’s allow network administrators to group hosts together even if the hosts are not directly connected to the same network switch. A VLAN is a set of end stations and the switch ports that connect them. Each VLAN in a network has an associated VLAN ID, which appears in the IEEE 802.1Q tag in the Layer 2 header of packets transmitted on a VLAN. VLANs are numbered from 1 to 4094. All configured ports belong to the default VLAN when you first bring up the switch. The default VLAN (VLAN1) uses only default values, and you cannot create, delete, or suspend activity in the default VLAN. You create a VLAN by assigning a number to it; you can delete VLANs as well as moving them from the active operational state to the suspended operational state. If you attempt to create a VLAN with an existing VLAN ID, the switch goes into the VLAN submode but does not create the same VLAN again. Newly created VLANs remain unused until ports are assigned to the specific VLAN. Depending on the range of the VLAN, you can configure the following parameters for VLANs (except the default VLAN): VLAN name, Shutdown or Not Shut Down. When you delete a specified VLAN, the ports associated with that VLAN are shut down and no traffic flows. However, the system retains all the VLAN-to-port mapping for that VLAN, and when you reenable or recreate, the specified VLAN, the system automatically reinstates all the original ports to that VLAN. So, after much troubleshooting, I found that this printer problem was due to the printer’s cable being moved to a different port on a layer 2 switch, moving it to a different VLAN of 10. Once the port was reconfigured for the proper VLAN of 40, the printer started working normally again and of course, the user was very happy and appreciative of the hard work that was accomplished to resolve their issue.
SysAdmin L3
Richmond County Government North Carolina
