Hello everyone, and thank you in advance for any advice you can offer.
One of the offices I provide tech support on just got a new printer an HP LaserJet pro 400 m401nw. The older one was broken and needed to be replaced. We use a print server to locally control the printers, but also make sure the offices have access to the ones that are in their office and not get confused by seeing other office's printers.
I set up the printer with its own name, calling it S3_back1 for sake of discussion here, and set up its own IP address, 123.24.56.78, and had the print server use that as its associated port.
Everything looked well, the server recognized the new printer, and it was able to print a test page to make sure that it worked from the computer and not from the display. Shortly after setting it up though, the print server showed it as offline.
I did the usual "turn it off and turn it on again" and nothing, it still showed as offline. Running short on time for the day I told my boss, I'd take it up to the office and try to figure it out from there, and if not I'll come back to it later this week to deal with. I took it to the office, and it still didn't show. Printer is on, and using a fire wire/usb cable I can print, but over the network, no good.
I couldn't do as much testing as I would have preferred, mostly due to time constraints, but what I did was:
Made sure the set up went through correctly, and double checked my double check.
Started from scratch again to make sure I followed every step correctly
Turned it off and turned it on again
Deleted the computer from the print server and the associated port so that I could repeat that step again to make sure I didn't skim over something important.
Made sure that the network cable and jack worked properly (didn't think of that the first time a printer wouldn't work on me... never again.)
Things I am going to try when the office reopens after Christmas:
Update firmware (which is what HP is saying is the full issue, though replies to that say it won't fix it.)
Re-add printer to print server, recreating the port for it as well
That is sadly all I've got. I'm still rather new, but I’m trying to learn as much as I can as fast as I can, which is both good and bad. So far, printers seem to be causing me the most trouble of everything on the network. The office is closed Tuesday and Wednesday, so I won't be able to do anything till Thursday, but I was hoping to get ideas and advice now so that I can get a running start when I work on it Thursday.
Again, thank you for any help you can provide.
DB