What have people been doing for their printer ip addresses?
We have kinda a limited number of static ip's that are available to us
in the department, so in general I've avoided putting printers on
those because for most cases, they didn't need a full, off campus
addressable ip. In fact, because while the campus uses dynamic
addresses, my experience has been that in general, as long as the
computer or printer is active, that ip address really never changes
once the machine is registered, even for the 35.15 addresses that get
assigned. So for most printers, we've just gone ahead and set them up
on 35.15 addresses, because for the most part those have worked fine.
(Ok, yeah, somewhere a year or two ago we found that you could no
longer print to those printers that are on 35.15 from machines using
msunet wireless, but that wasn't necessarily a huge deal for us.)
For a long time we also found that the Dell printers when you
installed using their software, rather than setting up an explicit ip
for the printer on the computer side, it would use the name of the
printer instead, and the computer was able to resolve it, which was
even better, because even if the printer moved, it should still find
it. Of course, sometime over this last summer, something must have
changed on the network, and that stopped working for us.
Fast forward to this week, and this is where my sloppy using the 35.15
addresses comes back to bite me in the rear. Whatever happened with
the dhcp server a couple days ago, apparently one side affect is that
a lot of machines (and printers) have gotten new ip addresses. So
needless to say, I've suddenly been getting a lot of people that are
telling me that their printer no longer works.
Ok, yeah, I'm willing to accept that it's really my fault, because
I've known all along that the ip's are dynamic. But I've also spent
several years where it's worked perfectly fine assuming they weren't
really going to change :). So I fully recognize, I have nobody but
myself to blame for the extra work that I'm doing now. But it does
lead me back to my original question. What would be the best practice
for dealing with network printer ips? We've got around 200 static
ip's available to us right now, and I honestly don't know how many
network printers we have in our department, but I'd really prefer not
to chew up half of those to assign to printers. (Plus we have a
number of network printers in a second building, and really don't have
very many static ip's for that building, so it's more of an issue
there.) Clearly, for 99.9% of the printers we have, there's no need
for it to be an ip that can be addressed from off campus, and
frequently it's probably better if it can't be (many of my static ip
printers have gotten hit with scans that have caused them to print out
stuff every now and then).
Thoughts?
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