WiFi, MESH and printers

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I have a relatively simple home network — an ISP-supplied router (Nokia) that I’m using only for cabled connections, along with a MESH system (Tenda) that does the wifi.

My printer is an H-P device that works nicely, connects to the wifi with no issues, and is accessible to anything that’s also connected to WiFi.

So far so good. But my desktop machine has a cabled connection back to the Nokia router, so its ip address is on a different subnet to the WiFi — the MESH system refuses to sit on the same subnet. So the router and the desktop machine are on 192.168.1.??? addresses, and the printer (along with everything else connected to the WiFi) is on 192.168.5.??? addresses.

So my desktop machine can’t see the printer.

I can’t work out how to resolve this — or even if I can. I assume I need to configure something somewhere to join the two subnets together but my networking skills are definitely not even good enough to work out what sort of a query to feed a search engine. I’ve been told “MESHes make the network complicated” but I think I’d worked that out already 😀

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You can try this:

https://superuser.com/questions/1662409/can-a-wired-pc-access-a-wireless-printer

Another thing you can do is get a wireless USB dongle and attach that to your desktop. That should allow you to run both Ethernet and wireless at the same time, so you can connect to the printer. I don’t think you have to temporarily disable wired to make this work.

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Thanks for this.

The posted solution — to use a static ip for the printer — only makes it visible to the PC if they’re both connected directly to the same router, I think. I can’t ping a 192.168.5.??? address from the PC.

I think I might be missing a trick. I could probably plug the switch the PC’s plugged into, into the MESH thing — it’s got an RJ45 socket that I think might work for that.

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Your PC should be able to see the 192.168.5 range so manually add a printer, select “the printer I want isn’t listed” and “Add a printer using an IP address”.

cheers, Paul

p.s. you can test connectivity by using “ping” and the IP of the printer.

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His PC won’t see the 192.168.5 range unless both are on the same subnet (unlikely, I’ll bet his wireless subnet is 255.255.0.0)

He could play with making both subnets the same, but the simpler solution (imo) is to plug in a USB wireless adapter (you can get a Panda one on Amazon), and use the HP install to connect to that. Less chance of making a mess.

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johnf wrote:

His PC won’t see the 192.168.5 range unless both are on the same subnet

This is not a network thing, it’s a configuration thing.
You probably have the mesh device setup as a router so it isolates the 192.168.5 range. As Susan said, it should either be a bridge, where it is more like a repeater, or turn the firewall off to allow traffic in and out, then add a route to your main router to tell it where the .5 network is.

cheers, Paul

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You possibly could go into the advanced section of the mesh and have it be a repeater of the Nokia and hand out additional addresses in the ISP’s given range rather than a separate network?

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

1 user thanked author for this post.

Kirsty

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I’ve never encountered a MESH system that won’t work on the same subnet as a router. Is it configured to get a DHCP address from the router or has it been assigned a static address on the 192.168.5.0 subnet?

Also, is the MESH cabled into the router or does it connect to the router’s built-in WiFi?

The fact that your MESH network can use the internet via the router, even though they’re on separate subnets, means that there is likely to be a configuration option on the router to allow devices on the 2 subnets to see each other or not (i.e. to route traffic between them or to keep the traffic localized).

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