Problem with NAS and network printer

[Mr Wibble]

I have a Canon network printer which worked fine until yesterday, at the point I installed my new NAS.

The printer will work over the network when the NAS is off or not connected but will not print at all when the NAS is switched on and is seen as a network drive by my iMac. Nas is a Buffalo Linkstation 2TB.

Anyone help with this and provide a step by step (i.e. idiot's) guide to how I can fix it - it's pretty frustrating.

Thanks in advance.

 

[ZipOnTrousers]

Can you supply more detailed info about your network setup in general? Its going to be petty hard to diagnose a problem I think without a clearer picture of how everythings setup... Most of the stuff I've read online has people using the Linkstation as a print server itself, but I guess you're just using it for storage and have a separate server with a printer?

Any error messages etc. or just no response from the printer at all?

One thing you could do is post up the config page of the printer showing IP, and the IP etc. of the NAS and maybe we can go from there... My initial thought is maybe theres a conflict of the IP addresses or something...

Seems like a weird one though.

 

[Mr Wibble]

Can you supply more detailed info about your network setup in general? Its going to be petty hard to diagnose a problem I think without a clearer picture of how everythings setup... Most of the stuff I've read online has people using the Linkstation as a print server itself, but I guess you're just using it for storage and have a separate server with a printer?

Any error messages etc. or just no response from the printer at all?

One thing you could do is post up the config page of the printer showing IP, and the IP etc. of the NAS and maybe we can go from there... My initial thought is maybe theres a conflict of the IP addresses or something...

Seems like a weird one though.

Thanks for the reply - you are gonna have to be gentle with me as I am a complete novice at this so no idea how to get you some of the details you mention.

Basically I have a single network router attached to a cable modem and the printer has been installed for some time on that network and has worked wirelessly - simply bu installing the drivers and the mac can see the printer in the list of those available, I installed it and hey presto - a little slow but has worked no problem.

The printer is in a different room to the router - not sure if that helps.

The NAS is now attached to the same router via Ethernet and the iMac can 'see' it as a shared drive when it's turned on. I can get data (music etc) to/from the NAS simply by dragging and dropping.

As I explained earlier, when the NAS is off the printer works as it did before. When the NAS is on the documents show in the print queue as printing....but never print.

One other point is that the NAS is enabled as a print server - again unsure whether this is relevant.

All help very welcome - if you can tell me how to get the relevant IP addresses I can post them.

Thanks very much.

 

[ZipOnTrousers]

Hm, is it possible you could switch things up a bit and plug the printer into the NAS via USB? If I am correct, the Linkstation is configured as the print server when it is connected, and it can't send the print jobs through the router to the printer. Whereas if the printer was connected directly to the NAS it should work. Could you try that before anything else and let me know how you get on?

 

[Mr Wibble]

Hm, is it possible you could switch things up a bit and plug the printer into the NAS via USB? If I am correct, the Linkstation is configured as the print server when it is connected, and it can't send the print jobs through the router to the printer. Whereas if the printer was connected directly to the NAS it should work. Could you try that before anything else and let me know how you get on?

OK that's fine I will have a look at that. Not sure I have a printer cable at the moment so may be a few days before I get back to you as am away.

Thank you very much for your help so far.

 

[ZipOnTrousers]

No problems, thanks.

Does anyone else have any suggestions? Maybe someone with more experience in networking than myself? I'm more of a Desktop troubleshooting kinda guy haha.

Thanks
Zip

 

[TEG]

More than likely the printer and NAS are trying to use the same IP address. Many older printer require a manually entered IP address, whereas most NAS systems support DHCP, so it is possible that the NAS is being assigned the same address that the printer had manually entered.

Go through the settings on the printer to get the IP address for the Printer, then use your NAS software (or Finder) to locate the NAS's IP address. If they match, then you should change the Printer's address to something else (and preferably outside of the range your router assigns), then you just need to setup the printer again on your Mac, then everything should work fine.

TEG

 

[ZipOnTrousers]

TEG, that was also my exact same thought initially but wasn't sure how feasable that was as I've never really used a similar setup - but yeah when I mentioned IP conflict above this is what I was referring to. Thanks for confirming.

The canon network printers we have at work all have the ability to set the IP address statically on the device somehwere in the network section of the preferences on the device - just have a google of the model and should come up with instructions.

Thanks
Zip