Changing a printer's IP address

[John Gray]

Assume a workgroup with a number of Windows 7 Pro PCs therein
Each PC has a number of accounts on it, the same accounts for all PCs
One PC has a printer defined on it, say \\printserver\Printer with fixed IP address ppp.qqq.rrr.105
All accounts on all PCs have gone through Add Printer to add this printer into that account, and download the printer driver from \\printserver
All has been working happily for a year or two

It is required to change the printer to have the IP address ppp.qqq.rrr.211.
This can easily be done but then trying to look at the printer properties in an account (to add the .211 port) fails with a message like "cannot connect to printer".

What is the best way to solve the problem without having to Remove the printer from each account on each PC, then Adding it again?
Would

• keeping the printer IP address at .105
• adding the printer port ppp.qqq.rrr.211 on each PC (and each account?)
• changing the IP address on the printer to .211
• changing the selected printer port on each PC (on each account?) to ppp.qqq.rrr.211

work, would you say?

Or is there a better way?

[StuartR]

John,

I have done this before without all that messing about, but that was by simply accessing the Ports tab in Printer Properties. You should be able to do this even if the printer is offline or has a different IP address. What model of printer is this? What is the exact error message?

In future you can avoid this issue by configuring the port to point to the printer by name, and ensuring that the name to IP address translation is available (on a DNS server or hosts file).

[John Gray]

The printer is a HP LaserJet Pro M1536dnf, not that that matters much.

By chance I was able to use one PC which had this printer defined by printer name rather than IP address - which is convenient in one way but at the expense of not knowing what the IP address actually is. I'm not happy using DNS or a hosts file for this, because that would be Yet Another Thing To Maintain.

I've got tomorrow to play with the ten or so PCs affected, so I'll find out how easy it is in practice - I also have to set up the new Samsung printer/scanner/photocopier as a printer on each PC.

[StuartR]

For what it's worth. I have a router which also functions as a DHCP server and a DNS server (this is a very common setup). I tell this device to allocate a fixed IP address to the printer. All my PCs connect to the printer by name, and the router makes sure that they can find it. Nothing extra to maintain, and only ONE place where the printer IP address is hard-coded.

[John Gray]

Sadly at this particular site the router is a 'black box' managed by a particularly unresponsive company.

When you say 'by name', do you mean something like "HP printer" or the internal alphameric name like NPI036783?

[StuartR]

I use a name like "HP 8500 Printer"

[John Gray]

Ah, OK...

[John Gray]

I found today that I could quite happily change the IP address of the HP printer when logged on as an administrative user, but, when logged on as a non-administrative user, clicking on Properties gave the message “Printer properties cannot be displayed”. The problem went away after a reboot, for all the non-administrative users I needed.

[StuartR]

Oh good. I couldn't think of any reason for this, and it's not what I've seen in the past!

[John Gray]

I can't think of a good reason, either - particularly because the PC just needed one reboot after setting things up in the administrative user, before setting up all the non-admin users.