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:
- Went over to the printer.
- Looked at the Printer Network Information Screen.
- Saw the printer’s IP address was 0.0.0.0
- Realizing this isn’t a printer issue, but probably a network issue.
- 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.
- Tell all the peoples on the Slack, “Yo dog, you can print now.“
- 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.
- Did a quick test, ethernet from the switch to the outlet upstairs was fine.
- Spend the next hour or so figuring out that our primary network switch has gone bad.
- 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.