Last week a customer called for help: a network printer stopped printing. A printer technician made some efforts, said it’s network issue, then left.
We investigated the network infrastructure on site. All computers are on WiFi. only 2 printers connected via Ethernet cables. The other printer is still working and we located the connection without much effort. However the one that had issue, although is physically connected to a wall jack, it’s not on the network. Between the wall jack and router, there’s a failure point.
Now the challenge is to locate the the physical path of this link. However there was no diagram, no proper label; the toner couldn’t pick a tone. There might be a small switch somewhere in the corner to bridge the printer and router. Chatted with staffs who could possibly know a bit about the network. No clue. Tried to contact whoever did the cabling, customer couldn’t remember who did.
Dead end!
But we didn’t tell customer to get a cabling contractor to install a new cable, although that’s a natural answer. We suggested 2 workarounds. The 1st one is to install a WiFi extender with Ethernet port; the 2nd one is to connect the printer to a pc nearby via usb cable, and share printer on the pc. Customer chose the 2nd option. And so we did.
Issue resolved!
