Shared Printer Problems in FH Room

Our stake has a small room in each of our four buildings that we use for Family History work.
In each of these rooms we have a host computer that's configured with a printer that's shared among the workstations in the room. For years this has been working just fine.

Last week I spent several days trying to determine why one workstation in one of the buildings wasn't seeing the shared printer. I finally tracked it down to the fact that this workstation had been assigned a different IP/Gateway address than that of the host computer where the printer was.

This morning I have another report of the same thing in a different building.

In using the TM program (tm.lds.org) I notice that, at least in our case, each Cisco Firewall/Router has two groups of zones. Each zone has its own range of IP addresses. So when a computer is booted if it's assigned an IP/Gateway address from - let's say Zone1 and the rest of the computers in the room get addresses from Zone2 we have the problem of communication.

I'm thinking about setting the IP/Gateway manually for each computer but that wouldn't work very well either because the address that I chose may have already been assigned previously.

I'm going to call the GSC today and see what ideas they have. I would think that the zones should be configured with sequential address ranges.

Suggestions?

What I think they should do if they put in a larger pool of addresses, they should remove the smaller group.

I have one ward that has a similar two zones. The second one is much larger than the first and so I think the smaller block should be returned to SLC and the bigger block remain.

Most likely what GSC will suggest is that you switch the computers to a static IP. They can help you select one that's not in use.

russellhltn wrote:Most likely what GSC will suggest is that you switch the computers to a static IP. They can help you select one that's not in use.

That's one option that I considered as long as it doesn't get assigned to someone else and the problem re-appears.

I wonder why they can't just enlarge one of the zones and include all the addresses in a single zone instead of breaking it into smaller groups?

techgy wrote:

russellhltn wrote:Most likely what GSC will suggest is that you switch the computers to a static IP. They can help you select one that's not in use.

That's one option that I considered as long as it doesn't get assigned to someone else and the problem re-appears.

tm.lds.org will give you a range of static IP addresses and a range of DHCP address. Assign your IPs out of the static range and you won't have a problem. Dynamically allocated addresses will come out of the DHCP range.

techgy wrote:I wonder why they can't just enlarge one of the zones and include all the addresses in a single zone instead of breaking it into smaller groups?

If they do that they're going to end up with lots of small holes in their IP address space that can't be used unless they allocate more than one zone per firewall. They can better manage their address space and help ensure they don't run out of addresses by just adding additional smaller zones from the start.

In general meetinghouse networking is pretty much exclusively for Internet access so this shouldn't be much of a problem. But, as in your case, it may be more of a problem for family history centers where network printers may be needed. I don't know if they make other accommodations for official FHCs.

techgy wrote:I wonder why they can't just enlarge one of the zones and include all the addresses in a single zone instead of breaking it into smaller groups?

Someone else has already been assigned the addresses, so they can't just enlarge an existing group. They could change the group to another larger address range, but then any computers using static IPs would stop working. So it would need to be coordinated with someone locally.

If they want to keep the two zones, then they will need to put a routing protocol on there so that you can route from one network to the other that is on the local device.

harddrive wrote:If they want to keep the two zones, then they will need to put a routing protocol on there so that you can route from one network to the other that is on the local device.

They may or may not do that.

Note, that it may work to just assign the station with the printer a static IP and then use that IP when setting up the printer for the other stations. I suspect from other posts that IPs may route, but the name resolution protocols are not going between zones so you can't call out that workstation by name.

I just spent the last hour on the phone with the GSC. The resolution was a reset of the 881 router and a reconfiguration that put all IP addresses into a single zone. That eliminates the problem and doesn't require a static IP. Should be working fine now.

I'd suggest that if anyone else has the same problem that they ask for the 881 to be reconfigured. If a ticket number would be helpful for reference - IM2579458.

I'm sure the GSC will be happy to get those calls