Home network printer help

I am trying to connect to a printer on a home network. I am using a dsl modem and router. I have installed the software for the printer on the new computer and was able to get it to print a test page once but have been unable to get the printer to print from this computer since. The printer works great on the original computer. I have read that the router assigns the printer an ip address. If so, how do I find that ip address? If anyone needs more specifics let me know. I need some help, thanks and Best regards,

 

Network Printer

Is this a wireless or standard ethernet wire network ?
If it is a standard wired network then you can set up the network printer in Windows plus you have to install the printer software seperately on each
computer . If you have more than one printer on the computer then ensure that when you print you have chosen the selected printer.
I believe your confusion over whether an ip is required occurs when a wireless printer is involved . You need the ip assigned by the router to the wireless printer to get into its control panel similar to the web based interface of a router.
You might want to try a program called Network Magic to make your printer sharing on the network easier if this is all confusing. Networking is " Vodoo Science"

 

I don't think wired or wireless is relevant here. Both can use DHCP; a service that assigns IP address dynamically.

The most obvious cause of the problem appears to be that the printer has been assigned a different IP address on restart. There are two straight-forward solutions:

• Connect to the printer by name rather than IP address. Network name resolution should be able to cope with a changed IP address.
• Set up the printer to use a static IP address.

Personally, I would recommend the second option (although network naming systems should be able to handle changes in IP address, they can be problematic). Configure the printer to have a static IP address. This means you need to do two things:

1. Go into the router configuration screens and find the range of IP addresses that the router is giving out. This is sometimes described as the DHCP scope. By default, most routers do not give out all IP addresses in a particular subnet, which means that there should be a range of IP addresses that you can use on your network, that will not be automatically assigned by the router. Often the automatic IP address start at 100, or only go up to 100.
2. Go into the configuration screens of the printer and change its addressing from automatic to manually entered. Then manually enter an IP address that is outside the range of automatic IP addresses you found at step one. The IP address must however, still be in the same subnet (see note) below.

Once you have done this, the printer's IP address will stay the same even after you power off and on the router and printer. This should fix the problem.

Note on addressing
For most small internet routers the network addressing starts with either 192.168.0 or 192.168.1. For the network to operate, all network systems also have to have IP addresses start with the same set of numbers. So if your router is 192.168.0.1, all the computers have to have addresses that start 192.168.0. The last number has to be unique to each device attached to the network. The last number must be in the range 1 to 254.

DHCP on a router commonly give out a range of IP addresses but not all of them. 50 to 100, 1 to 100, 100 to 150, and 100 to 200 are all common. So if your router (192.168.0.1) gives out 100 to 200, that means you can statically assign IP addresses in the range 192.168.0.2 to 192.168.0.99 (not 1 as that's already used by the router) and 192.168.0.201 to 192.168.0.254.

 

Thanks for your reply. I downloaded the application you mentioned and the printer is up and working now from my new homemade computer. In the process I found out why it wasn't working with the Windows setup program. Learn a little more every day! Thanks again, Frank