Blog Post

Election, Politics

HARDWARE ISSUE

Written by Ahmad Sultani

We where called to an onsite location to fix a printer issue that was out of warranty and the business owner did not want to pay almost $900.00 to the vendor to renew a contract when he was     working on replacing the all the company printers.  When we arrived we where greeted by the owner who explain that he need the printer to keep working at least for another months while he was working     out a new contract with a new vendor for leasing equipment.  He then showed us the printers he was having issue with and we started to troubleshoot it.  Now we had not messed with this perticiual model     before and luckly all the printer he had where the same model.  So we begin by reviewing the manuafature website and found the technical manual for the model.  After a bit we began by reseting the printer     and finding the TCP/IP setting and setting it up to the local network.  But this did not work either so we check the network for any connectivity issue to the printer since we could not pull a DHCP or Static IP for it.     Sure enough we found that the smart switch was malfuctioning on this unit.  So we did a temporary by pass of it.  The printer at this point had not work yet but we could at least ping it now on the network.     So then we started messing with the setting again on the printer and found a few area where the firmware had to be open up to accept TCP/IP connect from an IP range.  Once that was done we recommend     a new smart switch which the owner decided he wanted to pick one out as we did not have any on hand so he took off after we found the switch issue and purchase one.  We set that up and than reset all his printer.     All in all this took about 3 hours to do as he had 4 printer reset and a smart switch replacement.  I think the highlight of this is that we where able to diagonis and troubleshoot the issue without a large overhead or delay in     solving the issue onsite at a very reasonable price of less than $200.00 price tag and we gain a client for life.