DHCP printer hide and How do I keep my laser printer from playing hide-and-go seek with the router?

October 14, 2005 11:04 AM

How do I keep my laser printer from playing hide-and-go seek with a Dell TrueMobile router and XP?

I have a Minolta Magicolor 2300 DL laser printer connected to my Dell TrueMobile 2300 router. The XP drivers for this printer want to access it as a Crown Port+, which requires an IP address.

Everytime the printer gets turned on, the dell router assigns it a different IP address (probably depending on what else happens to be on the network at the same time). So then I have to go into printer setup (for each computer on the network) and tell XP to autodiscover the printer's new IP address.

Any suggestions for how to avoid this?

posted by justkevin to computers & internet (5 answers total)

Some routers have a capability to always assign a device the same IP address via DHCP. (This is done on the basis of the device's MAC address.)

If the Dell router doesn't have this, get one that does. I have a D-Link DGL-4300 which has this. I recommend this router very highly. Netgear routers also have the feature, but I don't care for Netgear products right now.
posted by kindall at 11:28 AM on October 14, 2005

If your router doesn't have 'static DHCP' like kindall mentioned, you should be able to just set a static IP address on the printer itself. After all, it's a printer; you're not going to go connecting it to different networks all the time, right?
posted by zsazsa at 11:35 AM on October 14, 2005

I was assuming the printer didn't have that, or Kevin would have set it up already. Oops, I guess I ass-u-me'd.

If you do that, take a look at the range of IP addresses that the router doles out and assign the printer an address outside that range. On some routers you can set it; on other routers you may have to just observe the addresses you get (they will be clustered together) and set the static IP far away from them. .254 might be a good one to try in that case.
posted by kindall at 11:47 AM on October 14, 2005

If you set a static IP on your printer, put it within the range of the netmask for the router (probably 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0) but OUTSIDE the range of dynamically allocated IPs (could be anything, might be 192.168.1.100 - 192.168.1.200).

This way the router won't accidentally hand out your printer's IP to a computer.
posted by shepd at 11:47 AM on October 14, 2005

Seems I can set the printer's IP-- I wasn't aware of this feature until now. I have to connect to it with a web browser, it's not available through the normal control panel.

I'll give it a shot, thanks.
posted by justkevin at 12:22 PM on October 14, 2005