Network printers

[bierrrr.CC]

Currently I've got around 20 vlans, each containing several printers. As our technicians are messing with them quite often, especially replacing one with another quickly in case of a failure, they tend to forget IP addresses of them printers and they ask me for help. I'm quite tired of this so I'm thinking of moving all printers to a separate subnet. So here's my question: what is the best practice regarding network printers? Is it a good idea? I'm wondering about the traffic, as whole communication with printers will have to go through the router. From the other side, I think it is already happening as all printers are installed on a print server and shared. I guess every PC has to connect to the server (which is on a different subnet) anyway when users want to print?

[Latchum Naidu]

Hi,

As long as you have seperate subnet for printers you are safe in your case.
You need to make sure the inter vlan routing as there will be different vlan's like PC's, Print server and Printers.

As per Best Practice would either be to assign it a static IP address.

if you are talking from business perspective, you should definetly set up a hard address. In order to print any from from client you have to set up the printer on all your pc's and give it the address of the printer , if you let dhcp hand out the addresses then the printer could acquire a different address and you get intermittent or no connectivity to the printer.

Hope this clear you and please rate...

Regards,
Naidu.

[bierrrr.CC]

Thanks. Server and printers have got static IPs of course. My only concern is potential increase in traffic to the router. That's why I asked for best pracitces, to see advantages and disadvantages of having all printers on separate subnet.

[Latchum Naidu]

Hi,

Its all depends on your setup and needs.
Do you have vlans in your environment?
If yes printers or in which Vlan? apart from the seperate vlan

Are they printers are not communicating with other vlan's?

If they are in communication with other vlan's then they are already going to router to communicate with other vlan's right?

The best advantage to have printers in seperate subnet is you can easily trace issues very easily and of course if you have big printers environment then you should go with seperate subnet.

Hope this clear you...

Regards,

Naidu.

[bierrrr.CC]

Yeah got 28 vlans, most of which got several printers. Tracing right now is a nightmare and I can see that pros owerweight cons of that solution. Thank you.