Wireless Printer Problems.

Artemis

Okay, so I'm at college - again. (and may I add, I like my sophomore year a helluva lot more than my freshman year.)

My roommate doesn't have a printer and we planned to share mine (printer/copier/scanner). It's a Photosmart HP one...Model: C4780. It has built in wireless function.

We want to access it wirelessly so we can share it. But I can't get it set up! I have a Belkin router at my dorm set up as an access point (that's how we get wireless here) and I can't for the life of me get my printer to connect! The HP setup utility said that it CAN connect but isn't getting any data...probably due to MAC filtering.

I called up Network Services and gave them the MAC ID of my printer. They added it for me and said it should work now. I'm still getting the same error though.

I've tried temporarily disabling my firewall too and NOTHING'S worked.

I have windows 7 by the way.

Anyone have any advice??

mtrox

Might be asking a lot Artemis. The HP disks install so that you print to the NETBIOS name of the printer. Depending on how your school's system is set up, NETBIOS may not work well there. The more reliable way is to give the printer a static IP, then hit that. I never fool with NETBIOS on those. To do that, you need to beg your school's help desk to give the same IP address to the MAC of your pinter. If you can do that, then set your print drive to print to a TCP/IP port that is the static IP of your pinter.

The other problem is firewalls. That mean's Internet Security type suites such as McAfee, Norton, Trend Micro, etc. There's no easy way to tell you how to get around that. They're all different. But that might also be what's blocking NETBIOS. Could also block TCP/IP printing for that matter.

If you can temporarily disable the firewalls on both machines, see if that will let you hit the printer. Then turn the firewall back on (unless you want the crud that all the freshman are bringing in on their disease infested laptops), then you know the problem is the firewalls and you can check the logs, and work through what's being blocked.

Artemis

Thanks for your help!

Actually, things worked out well. I had been using a router that I had configured myself...I had a second router that the networking services was configuring to the network...took them month to do!

Anyway, I got my router back and I had to tweak the printer settings a bit and it worked fine! I sent the MAC ID address to the admin again to make sure it was registered and that did the trick. I now get wireless printing/scanning, which is awesome.