I was at a friend’s house this weekend, and he asked me if I could help him with his printer setup. It turns out, I could not, so I turn to the collective wisdom of the SDMB for guidance.
He lives out in the boonies, so his internet is provided through a Verizon Jetpack hotspot. His laptop is running Windows 10. The printer is an HP 5520 with wireless capabilities.
The printer is not connected to the laptop, and the printer is not defined on the laptop. I was unable to add the printer because it could not be seen by the laptop.
The laptop and printer both get their IP addresses via DHCP served by the hotspot. The laptop was 192.168.1.9 and the printer was 192.168.1.6; both had a Subnet Mask of 255.255.255.0, and both had a Default Gateway of 192.168.1.1. When I browsed to 192.168.1.1, the Admin site for the hotspot was displayed. I logged in to the hotspot Admin site, and verified that both IP addresses were valid and recognized by the hotspot.
Both the laptop and the printer are connected to the internet through the hotspot. From the laptop, I logged on to my email account and sent an email to his printer (e.g.: unique_printer_name@hpeprint.com), and after about 5 minutes, the page printed out.
When I tried to ping the printer from the laptop, I got a “Host unreachable” error (sorry, that may not be the actual term … it was “something something unreachable”, as opposed to “Request timed out”).
On the laptop, I tried enabling the firewall rules for File and Printer Sharing (Inbound), but nothing I did could make the laptop see the printer. I think that the File and Printer Sharing (Outbound) rules were already enabled.
It feels like the hotspot was enabling connections from the devices, but was not allowing them to see each other. However, I couldn’t find any obvious setting that would enable that functionality. On the hotspot, there were no firewall rules in place.
I’m not sure what else I should have done. Any thoughts on how to enable peer-to-peer visibility on the network? Is the problem on the laptop or on the hotspot?
(Before anyone asks, “Did you reinstall the printer drivers?”, please note that the printer was not defined on the laptop, nor could it be found/seen on the network. Therefore, I had never gotten to the printer selection/printer driver step of the printer installation.)