Trunking with a Printer?!?!?!

I ran into a problem with a printer not receiving network connectivity. It was a production printer that moved from one bldg to another. After troubleshooting, I looked at the switch's config in which the printer was pulled and noticed the switchport was trunked. When I trunked the new switchport for the printer, it came online? That was weird, I don't recall having to ever do that. Does anyone know why that would happen or what I could do to fix that?

~Thanks

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Comments

Bigmanoncampus

I see no reason why a printer would need a port trunked to connect to the network. It should be an acess port just like any other TCP/IP host would want.

tiersten

Does the printer support 802.1q for some reason?

tech-airman

peanutnoggin wrote: »

I ran into a problem with a printer not receiving network connectivity. It was a production printer that moved from one bldg to another. After troubleshooting, I looked at the switch's config in which the printer was pulled and noticed the switchport was trunked. When I trunked the new switchport for the printer, it came online? That was weird, I don't recall having to ever do that. Does anyone know why that would happen or what I could do to fix that?

~Thanks

peanutnoggin,

What is the printer's manufacturer?

peanutnoggin

@tech-airman,
The printer is an HP color laserjet 4600.

@tiersten,
I'm not sure if the printer supports 802.1q... How could I find this information out? I've searched HP's website, but to no avail.

Thanks.

~Peanut Head

APA

If the printer was hooked up to a trunk port... that means it would be tagging the frames before entering the switch....

I honestly have never seen that happen... I don't understand why anyone would need it....

Can you show us the switchport configuration?

Are you sure it wasn't a trunk port with a native vlan set for the printer? This is how the hold 3500XL switches use to do their voice configurations... With a trunked port but setting the native vlan of the trunk port to the actual access vlan the PC should be on.