Connect to printer on another router?

Question

In our church, we have a main router that our staff and most equipment uses and another router in our auditorium for our guest to connect to. Our guest router is connected to the main router. The main router has a copier connected to it that I would like to be able to print to from a computer that is connected directly to the guest router. Is this possible? As of now, I have to go to another computer that can use wifi to connect to the main router when I need to print.

Answer 1

I think the way you have it: Internet > main router > guest router, may not be totally secure, but unless a guest knows what they are doing, they are not going to be able to access computers on the main router using simple peer to peer Windows networking because that only works on the local subnet (guest router LAN in that case).



Because of that, any sort of automatic printer configuration with Windows networking, Apple zeroconfig, or snmp is not going to automatically find the printer. But it could be manually configured in Windows by adding a printer on a "Local" TCP Port (IP of printer) and selecting the printer mfr/model (or possibly a similar model), if Windows does not automatically find that once the TCP port is configured.



Some printers understand different printer languages, one common one being HP PCL. When our main HP network printer broke I bought a Lexmark X204n all-in-one laser printer to temporarily substitute for the HP printer. Since the Lexmark does postscript or HP PCL, all I had to do was set the Lexmark to the IP address of the disconnected HP printer and everything simply worked without changing any drivers on our local computers or our main remote VPN connected factory computer on a different network.



Note that this would not work if you had: Internet > Guest > Main LAN because then NAT on the Main router would block and/or be more complicated to explain with port forwarding.

Answer 2

Yes, automatic detection, configuration will not work because you are not directly on the same network. It should support lpd, most printers do support it. You would need to define the drivers for more printer support.

Yes, if you switched the routers around it would take a bit more work to get it to work (port forwarding).

Answer 3

As I understand your network it is something like this:



ISP connection

V

Main Router (with copier)

V

Guest Router



This is a very unusual configuration. Normally a guest network would be implemented like this:



ISP connection

V

Guest Router

V

Other Router (with copier)



In my configuration, the NAT function and firewall in the Other Router blocks access to its devices from the guest network. In your configuration, guests can open connections to devices on the Main Router if they know how to do it. Normally, guests would not be allowed to do this.



If you are going to use a configuration such as:



ISP connection

V

Main Router (with copier)

V

Guest Router



I would make the network one single subnet. Disable the DHCP service in the guest router. Set it on a spare address in the subnet provided by the main router, using an address outside the DHCP pool for the main router and one that is not allocated as a static address. Then connect the two routers together PC/LAN port to PC/LAN port. You might need to have a cross-over cable, but many routers can use a normal cable. The WAN/Internet port on the Guest Router is not used.



This will give you a single subnet covering both routers so that guests can print directly from their computers.



This configuration should have little effect on security providing the security and permission settings of devices on the main router are configured correctly.



I hope this helps.

Answer 4

You could set a STATIC ROUTE on the guest router to get to the printer when needed. If your router supports static routing... here is a linksys article on it.http://www.linksys.com/us/support-article?articleNum=135048