My wife complained about not being able to print from her laptop, which is usually due to the printer needing a reboot, or HP Print Doctor needing to be run, having her work VPN active, or networking sharing disabled, or something like that.
So I started trying to figure out exactly what the problem was and it turned out to be really weird.
From her laptop, I could not ping the printer at 192.168.68.16. But I could ping the roku at 192.168.68.17 and the router at 192.168.68.1, and my laptop at 192.168.68.64.
And I could ping all of them (including the printer) from my laptop. And I could print and access the printer via HTTP from my laptop as well. So the printer was fine.
It was as if her laptop literally was averse to pinging the particular IP address of the printer. I disabled and re-enabled the network adapter for the laptop to reset things, yet it still wouldn't ping the printer.
Eventually I started to wonder if it wasn't the laptop at all, but instead the router that was blocking things. I looked at the routing table on the router and all looked fine. I wasn't really sure what else to check on the router, so I figured the only way to test if the problem was caused by the router was to just reboot it.
So I did. And the problem went away. Suddenly my wife's laptop could ping the printer and use it to print. Apparently it was the router that had, for reasons unknown, stopped allowing my wife's laptop to reach the printer.
If this ever happens again, does anyone have any ideas of things I could look into on the router to try to figure out what the cause of the problem could be? I've never run into an issue like this before that has been so narrowly specific to one device suddenly not being able to reach a specific IP address on the LAN.
So I started trying to figure out exactly what the problem was and it turned out to be really weird.
From her laptop, I could not ping the printer at 192.168.68.16. But I could ping the roku at 192.168.68.17 and the router at 192.168.68.1, and my laptop at 192.168.68.64.
And I could ping all of them (including the printer) from my laptop. And I could print and access the printer via HTTP from my laptop as well. So the printer was fine.
It was as if her laptop literally was averse to pinging the particular IP address of the printer. I disabled and re-enabled the network adapter for the laptop to reset things, yet it still wouldn't ping the printer.
Eventually I started to wonder if it wasn't the laptop at all, but instead the router that was blocking things. I looked at the routing table on the router and all looked fine. I wasn't really sure what else to check on the router, so I figured the only way to test if the problem was caused by the router was to just reboot it.
So I did. And the problem went away. Suddenly my wife's laptop could ping the printer and use it to print. Apparently it was the router that had, for reasons unknown, stopped allowing my wife's laptop to reach the printer.
If this ever happens again, does anyone have any ideas of things I could look into on the router to try to figure out what the cause of the problem could be? I've never run into an issue like this before that has been so narrowly specific to one device suddenly not being able to reach a specific IP address on the LAN.
