Need Help with a Wireless Printing Problem!

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I'm having a rather odd problem. I'm attaching a network diagram of my home LAN/WLAN to help in explaining the problem.
My wireless network was previously getting IP addresses via the DHCP server on my multipurpose network device.

This device provides a number of services including routing, switching, DHCP, DNS, Web, Mail, and Wireless Access Point. I recently noticed somesuspicious activity on the wireless interface (it seemed far too active for what I was using it for and the activity pattern between the wireless and WAN interfaces were virtually identical. I already had enabled WEP and MAC address filtering but decided to shut down DHCP to the wireless network.

I changed the default IP address for the device's wireless interfaces and manually configured both laptops to be on the same network. Everything worked fine. The unusual activity on the wireless network ceased and all seemed right
with the world...that is until I decided to print. I had been printing from the wireless laptops just fine until I made the change in the IP addressing scheme of the WLAN. I tried to print a notepad doc today and got a message saying it couldn't connect to the printer.

I blew it away and figured I'd recreate it. Wrong. When I try to using different methods, I get an error message saying that
either the printer name is incorrect or the printer has lost it's network connection. The printer is connected to one of my LAN
machines and is shared out. All of the wired computers can print to the printer but neither wireless laptop can. I know they
are on two separate networks but they were before I made the change as well and it didn't seem to matter. The multipurpose
device is a router and can route between the LAN and WLAN. Also, from the wireless laptops I can get to any other shared
folder, create, modify, and delete files. Naturally this also means I can ping just fine between the wireless and wired
networks. All the computers are connected and perform perfectly in every other way except I can't print from the WLAN. I tried going back to dynamic addressing but that didn't matter. I rebooted the laptops as well as the desktop serving the printer and cycled the power on the printer. No go. This one is beyond me, gang. I can't figure out what is missing. As I mentioned, I'm attaching a diagram of the network and the exact error messasge. Let me know what you think. Thanks.

 

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Update: I connected one of the laptops to the 24 port switch and disconnected the wireless card. I then could install the printer effortlessly and print a test page. I then unplugged the patch cable and put the WNIC back in.

Wirelessly, I can ping the computer serving the printer, the gateway and the internet but when I right click the printer and select properties, it says the print spooler is not started. I checked services on both the laptop and the PC and the print spooler service is started. I also checked RPC (Remote Procedure Call) and it's started as well. Just for giggles, I started the RPC locator service on both the laptop and PC but no go.

When this problem first started, I checked the event viewer on the laptop but there weren't any relevant messages. Now, I have about a billion yellow triangles saying: "Failed to connect to server. 0x800401F0. Something to do with MsiInstaller.

 

By IP but not by name. When I try to connect by name in the Run box from the laptop, I get a "network path not found" error.

 

Do I take it that the wireless network was on 10.9.9 before you started changing things?

What OSes are being used?

What protocol bindings?

Domain or Workgroup?

(Lots of questions!)

Harry.

 

I don't know why this is an issue, but I bridged the WLAN to the LAN and now I can print.

Windows XP Pro all around

TCP/IP

Workgroup

I can't believe it's a routing problem since I could otherwise connect to a LAN computer from the WLAN. Only printing seemed affected. Oh well...I'll try this out for awhile and see how it works out.

 

Bridging is the key. But depends on what you are bridging. If everything then the whole point of the net split has been lost.

I was going to mention bridging as a possibility. IMHO this is a WINS related problem, either real WINS or a caching of NETBIOS names.

The fact that everything is XP Pro means that the browselist system will be fighting everywhere!

Harry.
.

 

Ok...so why did printing work on both the wired and wireless networks *before* I changed IP addressing on the WLAN from dynamic to static?

 

Because they were the same network - so your 'network device' bridged?

Without knowing the nature of that device, and how it was setup it is a little hard to guess reasons.


BTW - why are you double NATing?

Harry.