Thursday, September 27, 2018

Network Printer NICs becoming unresponsive

I work at a corp help desk for a fairly large company with thousands of locations. We typically have the back office printers at all of our units plugged into into a cisco switch, set with a static IP, so they can print via network from the back office computer.

The last few months I've seen a strange issue. This issue occurs on multiple models of brother printers, and HP printers.

A printer will go completely offline, the switch ports will show down. Printer was previously working, set up by us with proper config, end users are completely locked out from changing settings. First thing I always do is check for port violations because we see those all the time. After a ton of swearing the end user doesn't have the cable plugged in to the switch etc, we've discovered that resetting the printers network settings and reprogramming the IP address, subnet, etc will completely resolve the issue.

As a one off, it's not a big issue. But the fact that it keeps occurring, with completely different makes and models makes me wonder. After seeing this several dozen times I asked my level two if they knew what could be causing this. They didn't really have any ideas or seemed too concerned since most of these calls don't make it to them.

Are NICs in printers just complete shit that go out all the time? Or is there potentially another cause?



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