Lost WiFi printer connection

[JohnOrrett]

Hi, asking for a friend. Last week in the Crosby area they had an interruption to the service, and had to manually link all devices to the router again.

They also have an Epson Wi-Fi printer, which worked perfectly. However, after the outage, it failed to work. Running a diagnostic came up with the warning that the MAC address  of the printer may be filtered, and it refuses to recognise it, despite trying to pair it with either WPS or manual IP address.

Most of the Google responses mentioned turning off MAC filtering on the router, but after logging in, it does not appear to have this functionality turned on.

Has anyone come across this before? Unfortunately they didn't have the printer USB cable so I couldn't even connect it via a PC

Many thanks,

John

[JohnOrrett]

As a follow on, the error code is E-6 and Epson Support says this:
Check if the MAC address is disabled. If it is enabled, register the printer’s MAC address so that it is not filtered. See the documentation provided with the access point for details. You can check the printer's MAC address from the network status screen on the printer's control panel or by printing a network status sheet.
If the access point’s shared authentication is enabled on the WEP security method, make sure the authentication key and index are correct.

[David_Bn]

Good Evening @JohnOrrett, can you confirm if your friend has since been able to reconnect the printer to the broadband services?

Kindest regards,

David_Bn

[carl_pearce · Accepted solution]

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@JohnOrrett wrote:

Hi, asking for a friend. Last week in the Crosby area they had an interruption to the service, and had to manually link all devices to the router again.

They also have an Epson Wi-Fi printer, which worked perfectly. However, after the outage, it failed to work. Running a diagnostic came up with the warning that the MAC address  of the printer may be filtered, and it refuses to recognise it, despite trying to pair it with either WPS or manual IP address.

Most of the Google responses mentioned turning off MAC filtering on the router, but after logging in, it does not appear to have this functionality turned on.

Has anyone come across this before? Unfortunately they didn't have the printer USB cable so I couldn't even connect it via a PC

Many thanks,

John

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It sounds like at some point their HUB was setup to have two SSIDs (Wireless network names), one for the 2.4 and one for the 5Ghz band.

Occasionally when there is an outage any HUB settings changed from default can reset. By default both bands are on one SSID which some devices do not like.

The Epson printer probably prefers the 2.4Ghz band and will no longer connect as it does not like the merged SSID!

It also explains why all devices had to be reconnected following the outage. By default the HUB SSID is VMxxxxxxx.

If I'm correct then they will need to access their HUB and split the SSID back out in the below section of the HUB settings, like the example:

[JohnOrrett]

Thanks to Carl and David for their input. 

The printer is now working successfully. The hub (V2ac) was originally set up with both bands, and the printer was connected to the 2.4 Ghz band. I reset the printer network settings to default and went into the hub, enabled MAC filtering and then turned it off again. I also checked the settings as shown in the screenshot below, which were correct, but tweaked the section regarding speed and compatibility for older devices.

Once I set up the printer network manually (it didn't like WPS for some reason) it picked the network up and all working well.

Thanks again,

John

[Adduxi]

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@JohnOrrett wrote:

<snip>   Once I set up the printer network manually (it didn't like WPS for some reason) it picked the network up and all working well.

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WPS is the work of the devil and it's the first thing I disable on any networking kit ....   😉

[Corey_C]

Thanks for your posts and update,JohnOrrett,

Glad to hear sort your printer setup.

Cheers,

Corey C