Over the past few months, the kibbutz has been updating the internal network wriring: instead of utilising the old copper cables that were laid down for telephones, the "optic fibre to the house" project has been upgrading everyone's connection so that they will have an optic fibre cable from the main network server to the house. This should improve connection speeds by a factor of 10. Due to the war, there were a few weeks in which nothing happened, but in the past two weeks, four houses a day (which means 16 households in most cases) have been updated. My turn came at the beginning of last week.
One day a team installed the physical cable that comes out of the wall one metre from where I am sitting. A few days later, another team turned up with a new optical router that takes as input the optic fibre and provides four ethernet ports as well as wireless access. Two computers are connected to the router by network cable, so they didn't notice the change. I ran wireless network detection on my mobile phone to find the new network name ("noam_wireless_5GHZ") and connected the phone without problem. One computer that connects by wireless also found this network and connected. But on another computer, the only network detected still went by the name "noam_wireless", even though the previous wireless router had been disconnected both from the network and from the electricity. After rebooting the computer, I tried connecting to this old/new network; the connection was successful, and I noticed that transferring a large file via AnyDesk worked much faster, so obviously the computer is connected to the new network.
But my printer had disappeared (not physically, of course). I couldn't figure out how to reconnect to the printer, or more accurately, get the printer to connect to the new network. My original blog on the topic was not useful: "I failed to connect the printer to my wifi: I gave it the network name and password but no connection was made. When I installed the printer driver on the computer, it gave the option of accessing the printer via its own wifi.And lo and behold: I can now print from my mobile to the printer via the magic of wifi!".
The printer is connected via USB cable to one of the computers that connects to the network via cable, so I thought that I should be able to use this connection in order to change settings on the printer. I don't remember exactly now, but I think that I was unsuccessful in this. On the other hand, I was able to access the printer via its own wireless network; I connected my main (wireless) computer to this network then pointed a browser window at the printer's address. I couldn't log on as administrator at first, so I had to reset the password on the printer itself (this is explained in the printer's manual). Once I had opened the browser window as administrator, I redefined the local network, but still couldn't get the printer to connect to this network. I did discover, however, that a file that I had sent to the printer got printed when my computer was connected to the printer's network.
At the same time, I noticed that the toner capacity was at 0%, so of course I had to change the toner cartridge. I wrote in that blog from 18 months ago that I ordered a replacement cartridge from Amazon; when I opened up the box, I discovered that the cartridge was model PA-211. Despite being touted as suitable for my printer, I received an error message after I installed the cartridge. So I was forced to order a new cartridge from an Israeli supplier, this time insisting on model PA-210, which is the number of the original cartridge that I extracted from the printer.
This arrived the other day (i.e. within a few days of ordering), and today I had the time to install it; the printer accepted the new cartridge gracefully. Then came the time to try and reconnect my computer to the printer: I opened up the control panel on my computer and went to the 'devices and printers' section, choosing 'Add a new printer'. Three printer types appeared (presumably this means that their drivers had been installed previously); I chose the Pantum printer, waited a few minutes ... then saw that I (or more accurately, the computer) had a connection to the printer. I sent a test page and saw it print. This presumably is what I meant when I wrote last year "it gave the option of accessing the printer via its own wifi", although now I didn't see such an option. Maybe the printer driver was still defined as accessing the printer via its own wifi, so the driver looked for the printer's network signature, found it and connected my computer. In other words, this seems to have absolutely nothing to do with changing to an optical router. I should point out that I connected the printer to the optical router with an ethernet cable, although I have no idea whether this made any difference.
Hopefully now the only maintenance that I need perform on the printer is changing its cartridge once a year.
| Title | Tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 649 | What's in a name? | Israel, Personal | |
| 904 | Even dogs in the wild | Ian Rankin | |
| 1186 | E dorian | Song writing, Music theory | |
| 1274 | The luxury of digital recording | MIDI, Kibbutz, Song writing | |
| 1441 | Tables in Word documents opened in a thread | Programming, Delphi, Office automation | |
| 1553 | DBA update | DBA |
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