Is it possible? (WAN Printer Bonjour)

[camilaacolide]

Here is my network configuration in the company I work for:

Me (192.168.90.X) -- (lan)RT-68U(wan) -- Printer (192.168.0.X) -- (lan)ROUTER(wan) -- INTERNET

We have a private network (192.168.90.X) that uses the building shared network (192.168.0.X) that finally has access to the internet. And there is a shared printer in the building network with the IP 192.168.0.20

If I connect to the building Wi-Fi, my mac can automatically find the shared printer. But from my private network Wi-Fi, my mac cannot automatically find the shared printer... although I can still use it directly, by providing its IP address.

Is it possible to configure the RT-68U to somehow allow my mac and other computers to automatically find the shared printer while connected to the private network?

Thanks!

 

[ApexRon]

Your RT-68U is cascaded off of a building shared network, so I believe you are double NATing.

You state that the building router uses a 192.168.0.X network and your RT-68U uses a 192.168.90.X network. Further, you state "But from my private network Wi-Fi, my mac cannot automatically find the shared printer... although I can still use it directly, by providing its IP address."

• Do you have a static route on your RT-68U that points to the 192.168.0.X network? (I suspect you may since you stated that you can access printer by using its IP address)
  • If so, you should try opening UDP port 5353 on the firewall of your RT-68U. Having never done that on an ASUS I cannot provide detail how to do that.
  • If not, go to the LAN/ROUTE (using my RT-86U as reference) panel of your RT-68U and add.
    • If the printer has a static IP address (it should) then you can add the static route for that specific IP address
    • If the printer IP address is assigned by DHCP from the building router, then you would have to add the static route for the building network

What you have to realize is that most 'routers' used in the home or in small/medium size business are not true routers as they don't use routing protocols. They predominantly use 'next hop' and should more accurately be referred to as 'gateways'. The next hop for your RT-68U is building router.

I highly recommend that you obtain the app called discovery at the Apple store. I have found it useful.

 

[ColinTaylor]

Is it possible to configure the RT-68U to somehow allow my mac and other computers to automatically find the shared printer while connected to the private network?

Not as far as I am aware. Bonjour/mDNS is designed to only work within the local subnet because it uses multicast traffic. If you had a suitable router you might be able to setup multicast forwarding, but I'm pretty sure the Asus can't do that (and you'd have to turn off NAT).

But given that the IP address of the printer is fixed I'd have thought that it would be fairly trivial to configure it on the clients.