How I fixed the fucking printer

Rolling in to the office – a bit late – on a Tuesday morning after a long holiday weekend only to see Slack filled up with posts about not being able to print to the fancy color printer. Followed by 2 hours of different people going to the printer, restarting it, trying to print, and then giving up.

I didn’t need to print anything and I was on some client deliverable deadlines for later that morning. Mind you, the printer is outside my responsibilities in this company.

After getting a lecture from a junior-level coworker complaining that I know too many things and I need to share more info and how-to’s so they aren’t as dependent upon me especially when my time is limited due to client deliverables.

But after enough grief, I gave up and took a look.

Here’s how I fixed the fucking printer:

1. Went over to the printer.
2. Looked at the Printer Network Information Screen.
3. Saw the printer’s IP address was 0.0.0.0
4. Realizing this isn’t a printer issue, but probably a network issue.
5. The WiFi Router is on the same work bench as the printer. Plugged in an ethernet cable from the WiFi router to the printer. Bam. I can print.
6. Tell all the peoples on the Slack, “Yo dog, you can print now.“
7. Looking at the bigger picture, there is obviously something afoot with the physical network as it was hardwired from the primary network switch in the basement.
8. Did a quick test, ethernet from the switch to the outlet upstairs was fine.
9. Spend the next hour or so figuring out that our primary network switch has gone bad.
10. Moved core network devices to a secondary switch, taking the opportunity to dead-end some unused ethernet ports and harden the local office network security a bit from rogue red team plugin boxes.

So, to answer the question. No, I didn’t know what was wrong with it when I started looking at it. But, it is as simple as: “Okay, it’s not working, where are the failure points? Look there first.”

And that is how I fixed the fucking printer. This isn’t a lesson in me not sharing knowledge, this is a lesson on improving your own problem solving skills.

I fix stuff like this all the time, but sometimes I forget that knowing where to start is the real skill. If you want to troubleshoot anything, start with the path the data is supposed to travel. Find the place where it stops. Then work outward from there.