5 ms·

Printing at home is so horrible. I have a printer connected to my Wifi router. It changes IP every time I reboot. When it changes IP, Windows can't find it. I c

Printing at home is so horrible. I have a printer connected to my Wifi router. It changes IP every time I reboot. When it changes IP, Windows can't find it. I can give the printer a static IP but how many people know to do this? Wifi has been around for more than 2 decades. Isn't that enough time to figure out a solution?

jamescostian 3y ago
It could be your router giving it a new IP address, but the printer itself hopefully has a static MAC address. Check your router settings for static IP assignment, they may be under a section called DHCP. Over there you could give it a static IP address for its current MAC address EDIT: this comment no longer makes sense after the parent comment was edited. It used to be explicitly asking for help and didn't mention any solutions like static IPs, nor did it spell out a general remark about how this complexity in consumer electronics is bad
- bombcar 3y ago
  It's actually sometimes sold as a "security" feature - short DHCP leases with no memory. Which is kinda silly, if the router hasn't needed to give the IP to another client, just remember it forever.
  - kube-system 3y ago
    If people start using dynamic IPs as if they are static, when they really aren't, they're just setting themselves up for failure the next time the devices reboots or resets. It's better to either use static addressing if you want static addressing, or use DNS if you don't know what the IP is going to be.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- breadwinner 3y ago
  You missed the point. I wasn't asking for help on how to assign a static IP address. My point was that ordinary people shouldn't have to know what an IP address is, let alone what a static IP address is, in this day and age.
  - crumpled 3y ago
    That's wishful thinking, imo. If you want to have a network, someone needs to know a bit of networking. Or you need someone you can call who does. Don't get mad at the printer for what your router is doing to its IP address. This day and age isn't as advanced as you'd like it to be, or you need a new router that does what you expect.
    - breadwinner 3y ago
      Thankfully people at Apple thought this can be easier. They came up with Bonjour... Bonjour is apparently also known as ZeroConf [1]. Microsoft is behind the times. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-configuration_networking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-configuration_networking
      - trimethylpurine 3y ago
        Bonjour struggles to find printers much more than Windows. My Windows users just click add printer and it just works. And let's not talk about file shares. Macs literally can't connect to any file shares except Windows ones (since AFP is out of support), and then only with Samba, and only with Apple's botched implementation of Samba which crashes, because it needs to create metafile databases on said shares, if a share has too many files. Try opening a file share with 20k+ images in the root from your latest Mac. Seems to me, as a mixed OS business operator, that it's Apple that's behind the times. Even out of service Chromecast devices and decades old Linux distros are better at network discovery than Bonjour.
        mortenjorck 3y ago
        I can’t comment on the file share tangent, but in my experience with a Bonjour-equipped Brother laser printer over the past eight or so years, I don’t think I can recall it failing to connect once. Granted, I’m on a Mac and I print about five times a year, so YMMV.
WirelessGigabit 3y ago
ZeroConf actually works pretty well as long as everything is in the same range.
- breadwinner 3y ago
  Is that on a Mac? Windows doesn't seem to support it.
  - Guvante 3y ago
    Did you change your router settings? It should all heal up with a simple broadcast packet. It could be your router defaults to blocking broadcast packets related to wireless devices. (Either in or out)
  - sp332 3y ago
    It's called "Bonjour" on Windows and Mac. Windows doesn't have support out of the box, but you can get it. https://learn.adafruit.com/bonjour-zeroconf-networking-for-windows-and-linux/overview https://learn.adafruit.com/bonjour-zeroconf-networking-for-w... Edit: until build 1703 in 2017. Huh!
    - ubercow13 3y ago
      Windows uses mdns natively now. That article is 10 years old.
- numpad0 3y ago
  Range as in L2?
  - WirelessGigabit 3y ago
    L3. ZeroConf is broadcast which doesn't go outside of your current IP's subnet.
alexjplant 3y ago
I can't speak to printers (much less yours specifically) but most home routers (or more generally servers that act as both DHCP and DNS servers) will create DNS records in a locally-administered zone for each DHCP client according to the request. This same zone is then given as the DNS suffix as a DHCP option to the same set of clients. I would think that your printer does something similar, so if you add the printer by hostname (which you can probably locate by looking at DHCP leases in your router's web-based admin panel) instead of IP it should always "just work".
jonathantf2 3y ago
Is it using a WSD port by any chance? I work at an IT provider and 99.9 percent of the time a printer issue is caused by this useless feature.
gerdesj 3y ago
Ideally your printer advertises itself via Bonjour/Avahi/SLP or whatevs. Ideally Windows receives these adverts and connects you to your printer. One or the other gets it wrong, with monotonous regularity. IPP is print anywhere and it sounds like its been branded "Mopria". I ditched a thing called HPLIP at home at least five years ago which used to be the cutting edge for Linux printing on HP printers. The bloke that developed CUPS said it was a good idea and I went for it. Now it just works - always. It sounds like Windows is catching up, finally.
- skykooler 3y ago
  Of course, not all routers (particularly combo router/modems provided by your ISP) support multicast DNS, so often this isn't an option.
  - cstejerean 3y ago
    I haven't seen a home router that doesn't support Bonjour in the past decade. It's a fundamental component in the Apple ecosystem and any home router that didn't allow one to wireless print from their iPhone would be considered broken.
    - brokenmachine 3y ago
      Do people really wireless print from their iPhone? Not once can I say I've wanted to print from my phone.
      - atlanta90210 3y ago
        Yes iphone wireless printing works great esp PDF attachments in emails. I use it quite a bit.
  - zamadatix 3y ago
    The router doesn't really need to support anything, the mDNS packets just flood the bridge domain directly between clients like any other flooded packet.
Gigachad 3y ago
I don’t bother owning a home printer. They basically all suck. Easier to just go to the library and print.
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  That was fine for me until I had a special tax circumstance that couldn't be e-filed, hello gazillion pages! amongst the other random things I was printing at a library or fedex this pushed it over the edge laser printers are the way
  - j_mo 3y ago
    Half my family now owns the small desktop sized sub-£200 Kyocera laser printers. It was honestly revolutionary the first few times I was able to connect to their WiFi, hit add printer on my phone or laptop, press print, and it just worked with no drivers or network troubleshooting or anything. They completely blow any consumer inkjet out of the water in ease of use, not having to install bloatware with popups telling you to buy more ink and preventing you from printing black and white when the magenta ink is "only" at 25%, printing speed, and the fact they don't outright break forever if you go 6 months without printing (where an Inkjet would often get irreparably clogged and be ruined).
- turtlebits 3y ago
  Get an old brother laser printer, they are rock solid. Better yet, setup Airprint as well. The novelty of printing from my phone never wears off. (coming from an old head).
  - code_biologist 3y ago
    I just crossed the decade mark with my Brother HL-2240, purchased in June 2013. I put a Raspberry Pi + CUPS on it for network printing. The resolution is a little low and I wish I had color, but I did buy the printer for literally $60 new.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    I really feel like the brother laser printer recommendations should all come with model numbers as not all brother laser printers are created equal. i have a DCP-L2550DW, and i'm not sure i'd recommend it.
strangescript 3y ago
No one says "I can't want to learn to code so I can program windows printer drivers". At the same time no company wants to pay the appropriate amount to hire people that can do this well. These two concepts come together in a fantastic display of mediocrity.
- ReactiveJelly 3y ago
  I might find it interesting, but I hate printer companies and they'd need to pay me extra to make up for the negative glamor
nostromo 3y ago
Apple seems to have solved this a long time ago. I didn't even set up my printer, I just turned it on, connected it to the network, and all the Macs and iPhones print to it, no problem.
- jawsua 3y ago
  They hired the guy who created CUPS for Linux and BSD, that's how they "solved" it
  - johannes1234321 3y ago
    And then they made sure to follow through and make it work. Hiring people in itself doesn't lead to solutions. You have to give them the tools they need and set priorities acros teams accordingly.
    - r00fus 3y ago
      Arguably if they had a half-decent team they could've done it without hiring the CUPS creator in the first place (like Apple did originally). Hiring him (which I support) simply gave them street cred and signaled to the company that this wasn't some unsupported effort.
- zerocrates 3y ago
  Linux has really piggybacked on Apple's efforts with the result that printing is way better there now. Beyond just the years of their work on CUPS, AirPrint is the big deal. Almost all printers for years now understand one of the handful of image formats Apple supports for printers, and they advertise themselves and their capabilities with DNS-SD. The result is that pretty much you can just print, driverless, to anything halfway recent. The driver situation was really uneven before. I don't know why we really need Mopria, the system Windows is going with, when we have IPP Everywhere, but the differences between AirPrint, IPP Everywhere and Mopria seem pretty minor.
riffic 3y ago
i just forward everything to fedex "print and go" (an email address which will handle print jobs) and figure it's cheaper in the long run rather than owning a printer at home

jamescostian 3y ago

It could be your router giving it a new IP address, but the printer itself hopefully has a static MAC address. Check your router settings for static IP assignment, they may be under a section called DHCP. Over there you could give it a static IP address for its current MAC address EDIT: this comment no longer makes sense after the parent comment was edited. It used to be explicitly asking for help and didn't mention any solutions like static IPs, nor did it spell out a general remark about how this complexity in consumer electronics is bad

bombcar 3y ago
It's actually sometimes sold as a "security" feature - short DHCP leases with no memory. Which is kinda silly, if the router hasn't needed to give the IP to another client, just remember it forever.
- kube-system 3y ago
  If people start using dynamic IPs as if they are static, when they really aren't, they're just setting themselves up for failure the next time the devices reboots or resets. It's better to either use static addressing if you want static addressing, or use DNS if you don't know what the IP is going to be.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
breadwinner 3y ago
You missed the point. I wasn't asking for help on how to assign a static IP address. My point was that ordinary people shouldn't have to know what an IP address is, let alone what a static IP address is, in this day and age.
- crumpled 3y ago
  That's wishful thinking, imo. If you want to have a network, someone needs to know a bit of networking. Or you need someone you can call who does. Don't get mad at the printer for what your router is doing to its IP address. This day and age isn't as advanced as you'd like it to be, or you need a new router that does what you expect.
  - breadwinner 3y ago
    Thankfully people at Apple thought this can be easier. They came up with Bonjour... Bonjour is apparently also known as ZeroConf [1]. Microsoft is behind the times. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-configuration_networking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-configuration_networking
    - trimethylpurine 3y ago
      Bonjour struggles to find printers much more than Windows. My Windows users just click add printer and it just works. And let's not talk about file shares. Macs literally can't connect to any file shares except Windows ones (since AFP is out of support), and then only with Samba, and only with Apple's botched implementation of Samba which crashes, because it needs to create metafile databases on said shares, if a share has too many files. Try opening a file share with 20k+ images in the root from your latest Mac. Seems to me, as a mixed OS business operator, that it's Apple that's behind the times. Even out of service Chromecast devices and decades old Linux distros are better at network discovery than Bonjour.
      - mortenjorck 3y ago
        I can’t comment on the file share tangent, but in my experience with a Bonjour-equipped Brother laser printer over the past eight or so years, I don’t think I can recall it failing to connect once. Granted, I’m on a Mac and I print about five times a year, so YMMV.

WirelessGigabit 3y ago

ZeroConf actually works pretty well as long as everything is in the same range.

breadwinner 3y ago
Is that on a Mac? Windows doesn't seem to support it.
- Guvante 3y ago
  Did you change your router settings? It should all heal up with a simple broadcast packet. It could be your router defaults to blocking broadcast packets related to wireless devices. (Either in or out)
- sp332 3y ago
  It's called "Bonjour" on Windows and Mac. Windows doesn't have support out of the box, but you can get it. https://learn.adafruit.com/bonjour-zeroconf-networking-for-windows-and-linux/overview https://learn.adafruit.com/bonjour-zeroconf-networking-for-w... Edit: until build 1703 in 2017. Huh!
  - ubercow13 3y ago
    Windows uses mdns natively now. That article is 10 years old.
numpad0 3y ago
Range as in L2?
- WirelessGigabit 3y ago
  L3. ZeroConf is broadcast which doesn't go outside of your current IP's subnet.

alexjplant 3y ago

I can't speak to printers (much less yours specifically) but most home routers (or more generally servers that act as both DHCP and DNS servers) will create DNS records in a locally-administered zone for each DHCP client according to the request. This same zone is then given as the DNS suffix as a DHCP option to the same set of clients. I would think that your printer does something similar, so if you add the printer by hostname (which you can probably locate by looking at DHCP leases in your router's web-based admin panel) instead of IP it should always "just work".

jonathantf2 3y ago

Is it using a WSD port by any chance? I work at an IT provider and 99.9 percent of the time a printer issue is caused by this useless feature.

gerdesj 3y ago

Ideally your printer advertises itself via Bonjour/Avahi/SLP or whatevs. Ideally Windows receives these adverts and connects you to your printer. One or the other gets it wrong, with monotonous regularity. IPP is print anywhere and it sounds like its been branded "Mopria". I ditched a thing called HPLIP at home at least five years ago which used to be the cutting edge for Linux printing on HP printers. The bloke that developed CUPS said it was a good idea and I went for it. Now it just works - always. It sounds like Windows is catching up, finally.

skykooler 3y ago
Of course, not all routers (particularly combo router/modems provided by your ISP) support multicast DNS, so often this isn't an option.
- cstejerean 3y ago
  I haven't seen a home router that doesn't support Bonjour in the past decade. It's a fundamental component in the Apple ecosystem and any home router that didn't allow one to wireless print from their iPhone would be considered broken.
  - brokenmachine 3y ago
    Do people really wireless print from their iPhone? Not once can I say I've wanted to print from my phone.
    - atlanta90210 3y ago
      Yes iphone wireless printing works great esp PDF attachments in emails. I use it quite a bit.
- zamadatix 3y ago
  The router doesn't really need to support anything, the mDNS packets just flood the bridge domain directly between clients like any other flooded packet.

Gigachad 3y ago

I don’t bother owning a home printer. They basically all suck. Easier to just go to the library and print.

yieldcrv 3y ago
That was fine for me until I had a special tax circumstance that couldn't be e-filed, hello gazillion pages! amongst the other random things I was printing at a library or fedex this pushed it over the edge laser printers are the way
- j_mo 3y ago
  Half my family now owns the small desktop sized sub-£200 Kyocera laser printers. It was honestly revolutionary the first few times I was able to connect to their WiFi, hit add printer on my phone or laptop, press print, and it just worked with no drivers or network troubleshooting or anything. They completely blow any consumer inkjet out of the water in ease of use, not having to install bloatware with popups telling you to buy more ink and preventing you from printing black and white when the magenta ink is "only" at 25%, printing speed, and the fact they don't outright break forever if you go 6 months without printing (where an Inkjet would often get irreparably clogged and be ruined).
turtlebits 3y ago
Get an old brother laser printer, they are rock solid. Better yet, setup Airprint as well. The novelty of printing from my phone never wears off. (coming from an old head).
- code_biologist 3y ago
  I just crossed the decade mark with my Brother HL-2240, purchased in June 2013. I put a Raspberry Pi + CUPS on it for network printing. The resolution is a little low and I wish I had color, but I did buy the printer for literally $60 new.
- dylan604 3y ago
  I really feel like the brother laser printer recommendations should all come with model numbers as not all brother laser printers are created equal. i have a DCP-L2550DW, and i'm not sure i'd recommend it.

strangescript 3y ago

No one says "I can't want to learn to code so I can program windows printer drivers". At the same time no company wants to pay the appropriate amount to hire people that can do this well. These two concepts come together in a fantastic display of mediocrity.

ReactiveJelly 3y ago
I might find it interesting, but I hate printer companies and they'd need to pay me extra to make up for the negative glamor

nostromo 3y ago

Apple seems to have solved this a long time ago. I didn't even set up my printer, I just turned it on, connected it to the network, and all the Macs and iPhones print to it, no problem.

jawsua 3y ago
They hired the guy who created CUPS for Linux and BSD, that's how they "solved" it
- johannes1234321 3y ago
  And then they made sure to follow through and make it work. Hiring people in itself doesn't lead to solutions. You have to give them the tools they need and set priorities acros teams accordingly.
  - r00fus 3y ago
    Arguably if they had a half-decent team they could've done it without hiring the CUPS creator in the first place (like Apple did originally). Hiring him (which I support) simply gave them street cred and signaled to the company that this wasn't some unsupported effort.
zerocrates 3y ago
Linux has really piggybacked on Apple's efforts with the result that printing is way better there now. Beyond just the years of their work on CUPS, AirPrint is the big deal. Almost all printers for years now understand one of the handful of image formats Apple supports for printers, and they advertise themselves and their capabilities with DNS-SD. The result is that pretty much you can just print, driverless, to anything halfway recent. The driver situation was really uneven before. I don't know why we really need Mopria, the system Windows is going with, when we have IPP Everywhere, but the differences between AirPrint, IPP Everywhere and Mopria seem pretty minor.

riffic 3y ago

i just forward everything to fedex "print and go" (an email address which will handle print jobs) and figure it's cheaper in the long run rather than owning a printer at home