Network printers at work static IP address?

[Russ Smith]

For people in IT or familiar with it, would you agree it's best to assign fixed or static IP addresses to network printers?

We had a server crash at work and during the rebuild I guess they reassigned the DNS name server (?) to a different place temporarily. We had a bunch of printers that did NOT have static IP addresses and when everything came back up, they had new IP addresses.

We then had a bunch of users who couldn't print, it would do nothing, they couldn't connect to the printer, it would say offline. Many tried to delete and re-add the printer and would get a message the driver was missing.

Monday I spent 2 hours on the phone with dell to get one working, he had to take over my computer and what he wound up doing was setting the IP address to static and using the address my computer had for it. Tuesday a different Dell tech support guy did it for another printer so those 2 now have static IP.

It turns out this is apparently dangerous because we use DHCP and the system doesn't know some of those IP addresses are already assigned. Dell insists everyone uses static IP addresses for network printers. Our IT consulting company says most do but they assign "high" IP addresses to reduce the chances of the number being duplicated by DHCP, so numbers ending over 100. 2 of the addresses Dell assigned as fixed were .60 and .61 and apparently that low the odds of a duplicate IP being assigned are pretty good.

So we're considering re-assigning new fixed IP address over 100, but then everyone who prints to those will have to delete and re-add, and we have to do it on the print server otherwise the drivers won't be there so we want to make sure before we do it, that it's actually the right thing to do?

 

[Covert Rain]

I think how we have it setup at my office is static IP addresses for our servers. That give our users access to both our Network Areas Storage and any printers. Each one of our workstations has dynamic IP addresses and they are easier to manage. It's been a long time but I remember once we switched from static on each desktop to dynamic. It was a pain but it was better in the long run.

 

[Brian in Mesa]

Static IP's rule.

 

[Russ Smith]

Static IP's rule.

That seems to be the going thinking and I guess the DHCP thing you have a set range of numbers it picks from so if you assign static IP's to printers outside that range you're safe.

We already have 2 printers that are displaying "IP conflict" one has a static IP now, the other doesn't, but must have been assigned an IP of one of the printers that now has static IP(it's not the other IP conflict printer they don't have the same IP address I checked).

We're small enough we're talking about maybe 8-10 printers and 3 already have static IP's and 2 of those are in the range we can probably use.

Just means everyone has to delete and re-add all the printers they use after the changeover but seems like it's worth the pain of doing that once.

 

[dreamcastrocks]

That seems to be the going thinking and I guess the DHCP thing you have a set range of numbers it picks from so if you assign static IP's to printers outside that range you're safe.

We already have 2 printers that are displaying "IP conflict" one has a static IP now, the other doesn't, but must have been assigned an IP of one of the printers that now has static IP(it's not the other IP conflict printer they don't have the same IP address I checked).

We're small enough we're talking about maybe 8-10 printers and 3 already have static IP's and 2 of those are in the range we can probably use.

Just means everyone has to delete and re-add all the printers they use after the changeover but seems like it's worth the pain of doing that once.

Static for the win.

 

[SweetD]

I agree they should be high static IP's at the end of the range.

 

[conraddobler]

http://compnetworking.about.com/od/workingwithipaddresses/qt/staticipaddress.htm

Static is the only way to go if the printer isn't a shared printer.


Just keep a map, write it down, start with the highest address available and work down one by one from there.

Shouldn't ever be a problem unless you get huge, by then it'll be IT's problem not yours.

60's is way too low if your company is any size at all, it has to do with the fact that if a router is never powered down it can get squirelly on how it assigns IP and it can reserve some numbers it really dosen't need to, one way to solve issues is to turn everything off, everything that could possibly have an IP address, this means shut down completely not sleeping, not hibernating, off, then unplug the router and the modem and let it all sit for a minute then power it all back on.

Remember copiers, scanners, faxes nowdays too, anything hooked to the network needs to be powered down for this, I do this a couple times a year or so just to clean out the pipes.

This will clean out the tables and assign a more orderly set of numbers but again, get the statics way high before you do this, then you should never have a problem.

Technically if it's static you would not need to do this for that particular item but honestly I'd do it anyhow in case, the whole thing needs to be taken down and rebooted, this is fundamental to almost anything computer related.

The reason you need a static IP map is simple, unless you setup the whole network, techs are habitual, I've seen statics conflict because techs liked the same range for the same stuff but ended up advising two different people to setup two different things identically.

You have to know what the actual IP's are of everything static to avoid conflicts.

 

[PortlandCardFan]

The other option is a DHCP reservation. You assign an IP address to the hardware/MAC address of the printer. I like the static option as well... DHCP with a 'x' day lease is a bad option IMO...

 

[Russ Smith]

The other option is a DHCP reservation. You assign an IP address to the hardware/MAC address of the printer. I like the static option as well... DHCP with a 'x' day lease is a bad option IMO...

We ended up assigning static addresses to them and doing some sort of DHCP reservation so it can't ever assign those IP's to anything else. Someone else did all that so I'm not familiar with precisely how but it seems to have resolved the problem although everyone did have to delete and add back their printers.