home network with ethernet printers

[oystercatcher]

greetings,

my sister recently changed her dsl service and her ethernet printers no longer work.

I will be going over there to troubleshoot but am fairly certain that some ip addresses

have changed and she replaced the dsl modem with some kind of combined modem/router

In the past I have always just hard coded the ip addresses of the printers (hp jet direct menus)

and then put a name and ip address in the host file for each pc which for small home networks

seems fine to me. I know at my last employer all the hp printers had hard coded ip addresses

and I "assume" that the name association was centralized somewhere presumably the dhcp server.

Anyway, if there is a better or simpler way to setup printers on small dhcp nets, I would like

a pointer to some documentation.

Thanks

[rendrag]

a lot depends on the kind of hardware that's now in place. Some routers have the ability to do DHCP reservations. That allows you to specify a particular IP address based on the MAC address for a device (so long as the device is configured for DHCP). That info would sync with DNS and be available to anyone on your network (no hosts file manipulation). If you change IP info (assuming the same hardware), everything will auto-update.

In the instance where you change hardware, having the printers on DHCP has a secondary benefit of at least already being on the same subnet as the rest of the equipment so you don't have to do a lot of tinkering to get it to work.

Again, it all depends on what hardware your sister has. If her hardware does not support DHCP reservations, the way your doing it might be the only way.