by Rick H. Blase

Created on: August 27, 2007   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

Printer nightmare or how to kill your neighbor's tree.

I got called to his house one day to work on his home network. He was having difficulty printing to his local printer. I looked at everything on the network and how it was configured and every thing looked fine to me. I ran a couple of test pages and you could see them queue up for the printer, but nothing would print. My boss was explaining to me how he had downloaded a document which outlined job specifications that totaled 215 pages and sent it to his printer and nothing printed. To make sure it wasn't working, he had sent it to the printer multiple times. As he was explaining this to me, I noticed that the share name for his printer and the share name for the printer on "his" network were slightly different. It turns out that he had inadvertently connected to his neighbor's printer rather than his own. So of course all of the print jobs he sent to the printer had spewed out of his neighbor's printer. I quickly setup his printer correctly, encrypted his network and magically it started working. He thanked me profusely for getting it working and asked me what was wrong with it. I merely told him it was incorrectly configured. After all he was the president of the company and an engineer. I didn't have the heart to tell him that he ran a couple of reams of paper through his neighbor's printer. Hopefully his neighbor never found out. Remember to encrypt your home network, boys and girls. You never know who may be chopping at your tree.

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