printers going to sleep and then not responding-connected to the MX device

[Meraki_noob]

Hello,

I am working with a client that has printers attached to the MX devices. The printers are on a different vlans. bonjour forwarding has been enabled on the mx. there are no deny firewall rules. packet capture does not show anything, nor do events. tried sending wake on lan and ping, which do not work. I am aware the printer could be going to sleep and due to issue with the printer its not waking up. the FW has been updated on the printers. sometimes the issue does not return for 20-30 days.

The client reports that printers after working perfectly stop responding to print requests and the only solution left is to restart the MX which resolves the issue. the printers FW have been updated. although there were no firewall rules, i have added an allow rule for TCP related sessions to the printer after the last incident. Has anyone come across such a scenario and what possible solution can be looked at?

[PhilipDAth]

Does restarting the printer resolve it?  I bet it does.

I had lots of issues with lower-cost printers over the years.  Meraki and Cisco Enterprise.

[Bruce]

Hi @Meraki_noob like PhilipDAth said, had plenty of problems with printers, and normally restarting the printer works. The other thing that has helped sometimes is forcing the port speed rather leaving it as ‘auto’ - seems some printers try to renegotiate the Ethernet speed/duplex when they go into sleep mode, and that appeared to be causing the issues. (You have to change the port speed/duplex on the Local Status page for the MX, you can’t do it through the Dashboard).

[Meraki_noob]

Hi Bruce, how do i access this  Local Status page for the MX?  i have access to dashboard.

[Bruce]

You need to be connected to the MX directly and then you can just browse to mx.meraki.com. Try setting the port on both sides to 100Mbps/Full Duplex (you can't force the MX to 1Gbps) and see if that solves the problem. 100Mbps on a printer shouldn't cause any problems.