Airprint printer (Konica) disappearing from network?

[Cazale]

Posted in Wi-Fi Network as I'm tending to think this is a network/Wi-Fi problem:

 

The school has 2 Konica printers, one colour, one black and white. They've just bought a load of iPads.

 

At another school I work in, Konica had to come and upgrade the firmware on the printer to enable Airprint. I'd wrongly assumed these two printers needed a firmware update, so scheduled an engineer visit. He came out, went through the menus, enabled airprint. We tested it (confirmed working), he left.

 

10 minutes later, every iPad we tried couldn't find the printers (either printer!). We could print using the app (pagescope?), but Airprint just sat searching for printers before timing out. The printers were still working on all network PCs.

 

I went in through the webpage and checked the Airprint settings. As soon as I made some changes (changing the Airprint name) they reappeared on all iPads. 10 or so minutes later, they both vanished again. I went back into the webpage settings, changed the name, the printers reappear. 10 minutes later, gone again!

 

I called Konica, explained to them, they sent another engineer. He spent most of the day trying various things, including updating the printers to the latest firmware. He found exactly the same thing as I did, you change a setting, the printers reappear on the network, 10 minutes later, they disappear again.

 

He rang around various people at Konica to see if anyone else had heard of this (they hadn't) and eventually gave up (note: I'm not faulting him at all, he spend hours trying various things). I think we both came to the conclusion that it is something beyond the printer that is causing this issue.

 

Wifi is provided by a Netgear Prosafe 16ap controller, with (from memory) 5 Netgear APs. Just to pre-empt a question; the iPads were on WiFi, and could connect to both the LAN and the internet throughout testing, and they could still print to the printers using the aforementioned app. There is no firewall between the WiFi network and the printers. They are all on the same subnet.

 

Any ideas welcome.

[Cazale]

One thing I forgot to mention: the printers are set so you have to enter a username/pass (stored on the printer) to release a print job. All staff print to the same account ("staff"). It's a bit of an odd setup (not done by me), apparently done this way to reduce print jobs released and not collected.

 

During testing we could still send a print job, but it would be rejected at the printer as the account details weren't entered (we could see the print job in the log file).

 

The plan was/is to move the iPads to a reserved set of sequential IPs and then set this range to allow printing without authentication. I have already set this up, and moved some of the ipads into the correct range. The printer still disappears from the iPads, regardless of whether they are in this range or not.

[Cazale]

I sussed this (just updating in case anyone ever finds these posts through a search).

 

It was actually nothing to do with either the controller, printer or WiFI. There was an unconfigured (and somewhat hidden) Netgear switch in the stack (with a default IP address, so wasn't showing on the LAN or in DCHP), it had "IGMP Snooping" turned on. As soon as I turned this off the Airprint printers fired into life on all devices.

[hallb15]

Thanks for the update - we have Konica copiers and our staff have iPads so how to print to them is something that I keep getting asked, but my current answer is that its not possible!

 

Slightly off topic, but do you use the Pagescope software on the server to manage the printers, or simply install the printers and share them?

I'm being asked to monitor and manage printer usage but the free version of Papercut I'm using isn't integrated in the copiers so can only log what is printed, not what is copied. Pagescope seems to be able to offer the ability to log everything, but I've not got it working yet...

[Cazale]

No need to do either. Once you get the firmware update you can simply enable Airprint using the web-interface. The printer then appears as an Airprint printer across all IOS devices and applications (which is a big bonus over PageScope, where you are forced to print from within their app).

 

Unfortunately using this setup you do need to let the iPads just release print jobs as they are printed. To enable this alongside authenticated print jobs I reserved an IP range for the iPads, and then set this IP range to allow unauthenticated printing on the printer (again, using the web interface). Fortunately this school only has 10 iPads, and will only ever print once in a blue moon, so it wasn't a big thing for me to enable unauthenticated printing for this few devices and advise the staff to stand near the printers when they release jobs. Not everyone will have that luxury of course. If you want to hold the print jobs in a queue I think you probably do need to use the pagescope app.

Edited May 10, 2016 by Cazale