Question : Problem: Weirdest IP/Printer/Network Mystery/Issue I've Ever Seen. Anybody Care to Take a Stab at This?

I've worked several hours on this problem, but I've hit an absolute wall. It started as a simple printer problem, and has turned into some sort of (what I believe may be) network routing issue.

Here's the story: We have a computer lab with a Laserjet 4250N running in it. Everything was printing fine until sometime yesterday. All of the sudden, nothing could connect to the printer, including my domain controller/print server. I turned the printer off, then back on again, got a few pings back, but only a couple. They "faded" out very quickly.

I thought, well, we either have a bad or loose cat5 or a bad printer NIC. Simple, right? Nope! I swapped the CAT5 with one that was being used on a working PC. The CAT5 I took from the PC did not fix the problem on the printer, and the CAT5 I took from the printer WORKED in the PC.

I then tested the printer NIC. It pinged 127.0.0.1 just fine. It was then that I tried pinging the gateway. No go again. OK, so we have a working NIC, but maybe a bad port on the gateway, or maybe a loose cable? No, remember the cable worked just fine on the PC (and several other devices I tested). Furthermore, I could ping the gateway, and even login to it just fine.

Then I thought it might have something to do with the IP. Maybe it was changed without me knowing it, and the IP settings are such that it will no longer operate on that particular subnet/VLAN. That wasn't it. I assigned the exact same settings to yet another working machine, and it could ping the gateway as well as communicate with everything else on the network without any trouble at all.

Another weird thing. I set the printer to DHCP to grab an IP automatically. That worked just fine. I could ping everything in the network, and if I had changed my server settings, I'm sure it would have allowed me to print since I could communicate back and forth with it flawlessly.

The problem is that I have a set of static IP's dedicated to things like printers. All the other printers in my entire network work just fine with this set of IP's. For some reason I cannot assign the IP 10.65.8.129 to that particular printer! The computer sitting next to it worked just fine with the exact same IP (made sure either the PC or printer was off depending on which one I was testing to make sure two devices didn't try using the same IP) that the printer had been using!!

I don't understand why either my gateway or server(s) won't let that printer use the IP information it has been using for months now (confirmed the IP had not changed on the printer). I don't understand why any other device can be assigned the same information and work just fine, and on the same CAT5 cable that is plugged into the printer.

I have checked, checked, and rechecked my settings to make sure they were accurate on the printer and server. Nothing has changed. Like I said, the printer just started losing connectivity to the network like it was being chocked. I watched it happen through ping statistics. I even watched it print out a couple of jobs after a power cycle, but then it came to a halt again.

Any ideas anyone?

Answer : Problem: Weirdest IP/Printer/Network Mystery/Issue I've Ever Seen. Anybody Care to Take a Stab at This?

I have actually run into this problem twice myself with it requiring a different fix for each instance. The first was with the exact same model of printer. I had two different errors going on at the time. There was an error code that would display randomly and i was also having the same issues with the printer "vanishing" off the network. The fix for it was a simple flash update to the printer bios.

The second was with a 1320n HP. Same vanishing issues but the fix for this was to simply  migrate over to using reservations instead of static ip addresses. I have now switched over to reservations for all printers and servers, for my network it just seems to work out better and I dont have all of the little glitches.