At our church we have a small network. It consists of a Verizon FiOS router, several Open-Mesh OM2P-HS wireless units that relay the signal to various locations around the church. One of these OM2P-HS units has a NetGear GS108 plugged into it. Into this GS108 is plugged two printers (Dell 2355dn and 2150cn) and a Cisco SPA504G phone. There is one other permanently connected workstation in another room and then a number of roaming units (laptops).
On occasion when one goes to print to the printers they show as "offline." Rebooting the printers doesn't fix the problem. Sometimes it is across all computers, sometimes it is on just one computer - right now my laptop can't print but the workstation in the office can.
From my laptop I can ping and visit the web management interface for the printers, but when I have Windows Troubleshooting try to figure out the problem it reports, "Printer is turned off. The printer needs to be turned on in order to print."
I also tried rebooting my laptop, but it still cannot print to the devices and sees them as offline.
Any ideas on why this occurs and how to fix it?
Even though you can ping the web management page, the actual port the printer is listening on may be blocked or inaccessible.
Try assigning a static IP to the printer, relaying on DHCP will make the printer IP changes every x time, where x equals the DHCP lease time, so when the windows tries to connect to printer it appears offline to it, some printer drivers can make the windows looks from some dynamic value in the network like a domain which can be mapped to different IP's from time to time.
So upgrading the driver or define the printer in the right way may solve the issue without having a static IP.
Assuming other devices are able to print to those printers, then the issue is either your PC or network related. If you can ping, then it most likely is your computer.
My assumption is that you are using Windows 7, but the general troubleshooting can be applied to either Win 8 or XP.
Three possible things you could do:
Verify that the printer IP address is definitely correct on your PC
a. Click Start
b. Click Control Panel
c. Devices and Printers
d. Right Click on the printer
e. Select Printer Properties
f. Make sure under the Ports tab, the correct port is selected
i. Select Configure to make sure the name of the IP port does in fact point to the correct IP address.
Turn off SNMP Status on the port. As far as Windows is concerned, printer constantly on
a. Click Start
b. Click Control Panel
c. Devices and Printers
d. Right Click on the printer
e. Select Printer Properties
f. Make sure under the Ports tab, the correct port is selected
g. Click on configure Port...
h. Uncheck SNMP Status Enabled
Verify you can print ‘offline’. Your printer goes to sleep, your computer cannot connect and thus marks the printers offline.
a. Click Start
b. Click Control Panel
c. Devices and Printers
d. Right Click on the printer
e. Click ‘See what’s printing’
f. Click on Printer (upper left) and remove tick from ‘Use Printer Offline’.
Until to reinstall drivers with new update try to see if the ethernet/usb is connected properly, if you use USB try to connect through different port on machine.