There have been an uncanny amount of printer and printing support requests this week — a disturbing number have found their way to me. Regular readers might find this interesting, because I know almost jack squat about printing, and tend to think IT support for printers is one of the most hellish things. It’s right up there with networking, email, and file restores — of which I’m only batting .667.

Anyway, it’s always “a network printer” or printing from “the wireless network,” which is dropping the support on my lap. I’ll say it once, here, for everyone - and then individually to anyone who asks. It’s not the network’s fault. We have 4000 machines happy on the network right now, and if it was really as broken as all of these assumptions are making, you wouldn’t be able to find me. I’d either be swamped with requests, be fixing something, or be out of the country. The last one sounds inviting.

Most of the problems are turing out to be printing from different IP subnets, and either SP2 or bad network configurations. (The netmask on the printer was 255.255.0.0 — no wonder it can’t route anywhere.) And when you connect to the print server, and you’re not in the AD, you need to login as UIUC\netid.

No, we don’t filter ports to your printer. No, it’s not listening on port 161 because SNMP is not enabled. No, it doesn’t need to be enabled. No, we’re still not filtering the printer port.

I wish this was another long weekend.