Wired Printers from Wireless Computers

[S_Burke]

Hello all,

I have two printers misbehaving in a new addition to our campus. The new addition has its own switch and the printers (both Lexmark M3150) are connected via wall jacks.

In the Meraki dashboard, the printers show up as connected and have IP addresses that are the same as what is displayed on the screen of the printers. However, I can't ping them from the Meraki dashboard - it times out every time.

I also can't traceroute or ping from my laptop.

Thoughts?

[Nash]

When you're trying to connect to these printers, are you at the new addition or are you trying from the old site?

Is the subnet at the new addition the same as at the old site, or different? If different, do you have routing setup? If the same, did it come that way or did you manually convert it?

If you go to the addition and join that network, can you ping the printers? Can you connect to their internal webserver?

[S_Burke]

I have tried from the new addition and the old site.

Subnet is the same.

We have the same SSIDs broadcast in all three buildings for the most part outside of some that are restricted to a specific AP.

I can't ping the printers from anywhere - I have tried in that building and out, and I have tried with my computer connected to the same SSID that I have assigned to wired clients.

[Philip D'Ath]

Are you trying to ping them from a Meraki device that should have access?

Are the printers meant to be in a particular VLAN? Is that VLAN configured on the ports correctly?

If using VLANs are the switch uplinks configured as trunk ports that allow the printer VLAN?

[Nash]

There I go, leaving out VLANs entirely. 🙂

[BrechtSchamp]

Do the printers usually respond to pings? Not all devices are designed to respond to pings.

[S_Burke]

All of our other printers are pingable.

The pinging isn't really the problem, the problem is that I can't connect anyone's devices to to the printers to add them as network printers. The pinging was just part of my trying to figure out what was wrong.

[BrechtSchamp]

Okay, what I'd check in that case is what comes up when you make a packet capture on the printer's port when you're pinging it. The least it should do is respond with an ARP response when it sees an ARP request for its IP address (you may have to clear the ARP table on the pinging device if it already had the MAC address from a previous attempt). If it does respond, the next step should be the ICMP echo coming from the pinging device. If that goes out the port, and nothing comes back we'll investigate further.

[S_Burke]

@BrechtSchamp

Here's the first appearance of the target IP (10.24.0.141) which is one of the printers.

13:18:27.641872 ARP, Request who-has 10.25.0.1 tell 10.25.0.141, length 46
13:18:27.642745 ARP, Reply 10.25.0.1 is-at e0:cb:bc:77:b3:18, length 46

10.25.0.1 is our gateway.

There are no echos in the packet capture.

[BrechtSchamp]

From where were you pinging for this test?

[S_Burke]

From the Meraki dashboard.

[BrechtSchamp]

I assume by that you mean from the client details page?

Can you instead try from the switch using the tools page of the switch of the red zone? When you click on that switch in the dashboard and go to the tools tab you should find it:

[S_Burke]

@BrechtSchamp

Still losing everything.

[Nolan H.]

If you go plug your laptop into that new switch/new subnet, can you get out, does everything work normal like? Seems like either the trunk connection to that new switch might not be allowing all vlans or there isn't a route between the networks to communicate with each other.

So best to take a laptop, 'become the printer', and see where the communication point failure is via traceroutes etc.

[Philip D'Ath]

>13:18:27.641872 ARP, Request who-has 10.25.0.1 tell 10.25.0.141, length 46
>13:18:27.642745 ARP, Reply 10.25.0.1 is-at e0:cb:bc:77:b3:18, length 46

This means the gateway and the printer are in the same VLAN - correctly. Can the gateway ping the printer? What is the gateway?