Brother HL-2270DW nightmare; going in circles ...

[Bucky Ball]

Try this one on.

Brother HL-2270DW mono laser printer plugged into a D-Link 524 router and a couple of wireless laptops (one 10.04 and other 10.10) using that as an access point and a desktop (8.04) plugged into the router.

After spending way too long setting the whole thing up I finally got one of the machines printing at about 4am. Nightmare ride. By 4:30am I had all three printing beautifully; test pages, pdfs, duplex, whatever you like. Life was complete; all three machines printing great on three different Ubuntu releases!

This is the kicker. I get up, switch on my laptop, try to print a test page. Nothing. No response from the printer at all. Click my printer icon and at the end of the job line I get:

Processing - Printer not connected?

... followed shortly thereafter by:

Processing - Printer Warning!

On further investigation, none of the three machines - all of which were working perfectly the night before - are printing at all and all have the same error message. They've all dropped the bundle.

What I can't get is that I'd changed nothing (unless I sleep tweak or the bug goblins did some tweaking in the night). All I did was switch the three machines off, sleep, get up and switch 'em back on again to find printing is dead on the lot. The printer wasn't touched, that was left on overnight. (And will gleefully print a test page when I hit the appropriate button on the printer.)

I am totally sleep deprived, bamboozled, frazzled, frustrated and fairly desperate. I have spent the best part of the day going in circles and can't afford the time (uni student with assignments due which is why I need to print!). Must have spent about ten hours on this!

A word; at least I had things working with Linux, if only briefly. I couldn't get anything working at all with XP or Windows 7, despite the disco printer installer CD. Oh, Brother; oh, so simple ... not!

I would really appreciate it if someone(s) could give me a hand with this. I have tried everything and scoured the internet to no avail. I'm figuring perhaps all three machines have dropped something on reboot today but can't figure what. I will provide whatever info anyone needs to try and fix this. Cheers in advance ...

PS: Cups and lpd drivers installed fine, no issue there. Everything appears to be fine until you actually try and print. The two laptops I have tried to get going but the desktop I haven't touched so I can have the working setup there (even though it is not working now!).

[Bucky Ball]

I will add that in System>Administration>Printers, I click the Brother printer and it gives me the details and tells me:

Printer state: Idle - Connecting to Printer ...

... and that's it. Maybe the printer is the problem? As mentioned, when I press the appropriate button it has no problem pumping out a page with printer details, etc. but maybe it is tied up on the network somehow so nothing can get through. ?

If I had any idea how to set the printers IP etc it would be a help. It did set itself something but now seems to have no IP again. I could ping it before but not now. I'm stumped. Any help appreciated.

[Bucky Ball]

Any takers? I'm desperate. Starting to think maybe the printer has dropped it's IP. How the heck do I force one in there???

[walt.smith1960]

Any takers? I'm desperate. Starting to think maybe the printer has dropped it's IP. How the heck do I force one in there???

Check the Device URI under printer properties. I've had something very similar in the past. The device URI started with DNSSD://something. For whatever reason that address didn't work. I've found that socket://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx where x=i.p address works most reliably for me.

[Bucky Ball]

Thanks for that. I was using:

lpd://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/lp

That did work on all the machines. Then it didn't after I rebooted the machines. I'll give your suggestion a try and let you know. Thanks.

[Bucky Ball]

Okay, in System>Admin>Printing I am using the driver 'Brother HL2270DW for CUPS' and for the device URI I have:

Device URI: socket://169.254.90.34

No difference. I'll keep trying (have no choice!).

PS: I also tried:

socket://169.254.90.34:9100

Nothing.

[Bucky Ball]

The plot thickens. I printed out the Printer Settings to check that the IP address was the same as when it was all working and ...

IP Address = 169.254.84.151 (via APIPA)

Before, when it actually worked, it was:

IP Address = 169.254.90.34 (via APIPA)

So, thought I'd found the answer. Add printer from scratch, use the new IP address ... no different. It just keeps processing the job but that's it. I open a terminal and attempt to ping the new address and 'Host Unreachable'. Where to now? I'm at a loss.

If the thing keeps changing its IP when I switch it off and back on again (which I did this morning) it makes like difficult! How can I jam one in there and make it stick?

I have tried assigning the printer a static IP by using the mac address of the printer in the DHCP setup of the router but nothin' doing. Ignores it completely.

Any help? Just ask for any info you might need anybody.

PS: I had no idea what APIPA was so just did a little research and apparently APIPA generates an IP address when a print server isn't present. Therefore, no print server present. Is the router the printer is plugged into the print server? APIPA uses the subnet mask 255.255.0.0 which is different from my LAN subnet mask.

I'm wondering if I need to have the router serve an IP to the printer through DHCP (DHCP currently off and all machines use static IPs), but of course, this would mean everytime the router and printer reconnect the printer is served a new IP. Impossible situation.

Where to from here? I stumble on ...

[Bucky Ball]

Just switched printer off, setup a static IP for it in the router using the printer's MAC address, switched the printer back on, printed the Printer Settings info again and this time ... APIPA is enabled but there is no IP address (or subnet mask) set under the printer's IP settings.

Could this mean there is a print server present - presumably the router - as APIPA is enabled but didn't kick in with an IP? If so, how do I switch APIPA off and get a custom static IP into the damn thing. Frustration ...

[walt.smith1960]

I'm not familiar with the HL-2270DW but the 2 Brother MFDs I have I can check/set the I.P. address on the printer via the front panel. For the socket:// addressing to work I assigned static I.P. addresses to both printers. My router DHCP server is set to serve a certain range of I.P. addresses. In my case it's something like 192.168.1.50 to 192.168.1.100 for example. One printer is 192.168.1.60 and the other 192.168.1.90. Same subnet of course.

[Bucky Ball]

Thanks Walt but no can do with setting the IP address from the front panel. The printer has one button in fact! Very basic but suitable for our needs. I have tried a few things but can't get an IP in there.

Not sure if I mentioned but set a static IP for it on the router using the MAC address on the router. Print settings show same as yours; APIPA is enabled but under IP settings there is nothing now. All 0.0.0.0. Still can't connect or ping it.