I have a Trendnet print server between the LAN and an HP1320 USB printer. The printserver speaks LPR, among other things, and I set up Cathy’s Vista laptop to print via an LPR port to 192.168.166.7, queue HP1320, and it worked fine.
After a rework of the network infrastructure, the printserver moved to .167.39, and acquired a DNS name on the internal network of studyprint.stewart.org.
To make printing work again on the Vista laptop, I created a new LPR port to studyprint.stewart.org queue HP1320 and all was well.
Yesterday the laptop stopped printing. Jobs were queuing locally. From a command prompt window, I could ping 192.168.167.39, but I could not ping studyprint.stewart.org. Aha! DNS problems. However Firefox and IE worked normally for names outside the LAN.
I tried nslookup, and it works fine. studyprint.stewart.org resolves, as it should, to 192.168.167.39.
Then I discovered that I could ping “studyprint” but NOT “studyprint.stewart.org. I presume because the DHCP server told it the default domain was stewart.org. There is really no excuse that the fully qualified name doesn’t work.
At this point, I remembered that Vista is not my fault, and hardwired the printer port to 192.168.167.39. Printing works again.
Dear Microsoft. How is it that you cannot make DNS lookups work reliably? How is it that nslookup works fine but ping does not? It is really too bad that C has some sort of Mac allergy.
Did I mention that the Trendnet printserver speaks Bonjour?
I think it is supposed to speak windows networking as well, but I’ve never gotten it to work.