Are you sure the printer is not OK?

[draggar]

My company has different departments for different things. We have a separate team who supports the printers in the offices, one for the retail network, one of the office networks, etc..

I had a ticket come in from the printer support guy (cool guy) , a replacement printer that went to one of our switch sites wasn't working properly. They can't ping the printer but he is sure that it was configured properly when it left the office (he programmed it himself).

The switch wasn't far so I headed over there Monday afternoon. As I was about to walk out the door I send the support person an email that I'm heading over. Sadly, i didn't receive the automatic out of office reply stating he was not in the office Monday until I got to the site. Yes, I gave him hell for that. (Like I said, he's a good guy and I was only giving him a hard time).

I get to the site and I pull up a configuration page from the old printer and the new one and the important information (IP, subnet, gateway) all match. It is programmed correctly.

I plug the RJ-45 that is going into the back of the printer and confirm that I have connectivity. Since there are two jacks, i test the other one and it is also good. Its not the network. I do some basic troubleshooting (a little more than what I'm allowed to do) and I can't get the thing to work and I can't even get it to be pingable. Hard reboot, green light on the NIC, it all looks good.

Tuesday the support guy works with the switch techs on it a little and they cannot get it to work so they dispatch Xerox out to see what's up with it.

Today (Wed) someone from Xerox is there and he claims it is our network since no one in his office can ping his laptop. One slight problem - we're on a secure domain and since his laptop is NOT authorized for the domain he will not have any connectivity, would not be able to pull an IP address, nor would anyone be able to ping his laptop.

He keeps insisting that it's our network. The switch techs hook up the old printer (it works, just was jamming a lot) and sure enough my company's tech could ping it with no issues. Again, not our network.

The tech from Xerox works on it some more and then says "Well, it's because your network is 100MbpS. This printer won't support speeds faster than 10MbpS".

I had to call him out on that one. I know that is NOT the case. My own office had 3 of the same model (and there are several dozen used throughout the company) ALL of them are on networks faster than 10MbpS. It's been a very long time we've had any printer that wouldn't work on 100MbpS, I even confirmed this with one of my (computer) network engineers.

The tech from Xerox left claiming that it was our network and nothing was wrong with their printer.

My company's printer support guy gave up and went home (well, he probably works form home so he probably just logged off his PC ) soon after that

[SteeleDragon78]

silly question, but if you connect to it directly would it print?
i ask because we had some printers come through the airline desk prior to its death that did something similar but turned out to have a problem with the main board, the nic would light up, configs were right but no output and no connectivity. when they were connected to directly they woudlnt print either. now these were the solid ink printers, dont know what kind yours is

[Der Cute]

Are the Nics the same from Old Printer and New Printer?

Is the printer name the same?
Did a sys admin take OLDprinter name off of the domain, and add NEWprinter name and add the same groups to it?

Check NetBIOS? Protocols?

Cutenoob

[draggar]

silly question, but if you connect to it directly would it print?
i ask because we had some printers come through the airline desk prior to its death that did something similar but turned out to have a problem with the main board, the nic would light up, configs were right but no output and no connectivity. when they were connected to directly they woudlnt print either. now these were the solid ink printers, dont know what kind yours is

The Xerox tech clained he could hook his laptop up to the RJ-45 in the printer and print to it. I'm assuming they have some sort of switch-replicator to simulate network printer.

No one saw him print, though.

Are the Nics the same from Old Printer and New Printer?

Is the printer name the same?
Did a sys admin take OLDprinter name off of the domain, and add NEWprinter name and add the same groups to it?

Check NetBIOS? Protocols?

Cutenoob

Printers are different models but have the same name, IP address, subnet, gateway, etc.. the users in the station might just have to disconnect then reconnect to the printer (normally don't have to do this, even with different models) but sometimes they do.

But - we still should have been able to ping the IP address.