Wireless printers on separate VLAN

[JMI]

Since doing a bit of subnetting on one of our sites we've been experiencing odd issues with the two wireless printers (yes, I know) that have been moved to the VLAN dedicated for printers. We can see the printers in cloud management and are perfectly able to ping them both from a test laptop on the same VLAN and from Meraki, but attempting to access the printers from the corporate VLAN has been spotty at best. We were intermittently able to ping both devices across VLANs and even print, but overnight that stopped working (Power save? Possibly - but restarting the printers did not make them recover).

I am sure there are a number of possible reasons for this, but I would really like to get to the bottom of this before I cave and allow the printers to stay on the main subnet until they can be coerced into getting proper wired printers.

Access points are all MR44. Things we've tried:

• Limit to 2.4 GHz, all fancy wireless features removed
• Static or DHCP (with and without reservation)
• Firewall bypass

Any suggestions appreciated.

[cmr]

What printer models are they?  If you connect a normal client to the printer wireless network can devices on the corporate LAN access that without issues?

[KarstenI]

Not only for wireless printers, two workarounds helped me:

1. Update Firmware
2. constantly ping the printer from the management station.

All in all, some of the cheaper ones didn't behave perfectly with this, but definitely better.

[JMI]

Printers are two rather different models - HP Deskjet Ink Advantage 3636 and Canon imageCLASS MF244dw. We somehow managed to get them connected to the wifi network again and have now set up constant pings - hopefully that will make them last through the night.

[JMI · Accepted solution]

Whatever we did, both printers are now stable on the dedicated Wi-Fi VLAN. I wish I could share what the solution was, but we are unable to point to a single cause.