Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Troubleshooting a Brother DCPL2540DW Wifi Configuration

This is one of those posts I'm mostly doing for the benefit of "The Next Poor Bastard". My Mom got a new DCPL2540DW printer the other day and it took a little headbanging to get it talking to the other devices in the house.

It's a fairly nice printer: built in scanner/copier, two-sided printing, WiFi with autoconfiguration, etc. Initial setup was easy, including one-touch wifi configuration.

Just one problem: you could see the printer on the network, but attempts to print to it just died -- nothing could talk to it. Connecting a machine to it via USB worked fine, so there was a problem with the configuration.

Condensing down about two hours of troubleshooting:

  • The Wifi status printout page doesn't tell you anything useful, but the Network menus have a status option that does -- stuff like IP address.
  • The Printer was connecting to the WiFi router fine, but instead of getting an address in the 192.168.2.X range like all the other devices, it was showing a 169.X.X.X address -- a self-assigned IP address.
  • My guess is that the WiFi router doesn't like to route packets to 169.X.X.X addresses, but probably accepts packets from them. So all the local devices could see the printer's "hey guys, open for business" announcement, but not do anything with it.
  • OK, several possible ways to fix this: tweak the router so it routes between 192.168.X.X and 169.X.X.X, force the printer to get its IP from the router, or the brute-force solution: give the printer a fixed IP address in the 192.168.2.X range.
  • So brute-force it is: go into the router configuration DHCP settings, and adjust the range of IP addresses it gives out to connected devices. It was 192.168.2.2-254, I changed it to .2-249. Then go into the printer's settings, and there's an option for setting the IP address -- set it to 192.168.2.250.

Bing! Printing now works from everywhere; Macs, iPads (Airprint), even the phones.

Some other minor tidbits:

  • The Mac drivers package only installs on Mac OS 10.7 and higher, but Mom had an older 10.6.8 machine. However, you can download individual components (CUPS printer driver and Twain scanner driver) and they do install.
  • With the scanner driver installed, you can use Image Capture to control the printer and scan, even from a 10.6.8 machine.
  • You can print from a 10.5.X machine using the generic PCL 6 CUPS driver, but not over the network; you have to use the USB connection.

I'm probably going to try and get remote email printing working at some point, if so I'll update this post.

Brother Support Pages for Printer