Oops!

Support call comes in from the marketing department at a site on the other side of town where they're trying to set up a high-resolution color printer/copier, and this pilot fish is the one who has to handle it.

"The vendor arrived and set up the device, but was not able to get the Macs in the office to print to it," reports fish.

"Since our facilities are all Windows except the pair of Macs in the marketing department, I remind the caller that I am not familiar with setting up printers on the Mac. Then I head over to that office."

As soon as she arrives, fish starts chatting with the copier-vendor guy. Turns out he set up the printer using a Windows system across the hall and was able to print from that, but was struggling with the Mac install. Fish looks over his shoulder as he looks over the shoulder of the user from marketing.

"Is there a ping utility on the Mac?" fish asks.

"Yes," copier guy says.

User navigates to the utility and issues the command. Copier guy gives him an IP address.

"Where did you get that address?" fish asks copier guy.

"We recycled the address of the printer that was there before," he says.

"But the 33 segment is usually only used for infrastructure," fish says. "We usually use 38 or 39 for printers. Are you sure that's the correct address?"

"Yes. It worked across the hall."

The pings show a good response time, so the copier guy tells the user to delete the printer setup, then rebuild it and try again.

Still no printing.

"I don't understand it. This should work," copier guy says. He scratches his head a moment, then pulls a scrap of paper from his pocket.

"Wait. The address should be xx.xx.38.xx. Try that."

Sighs fish, "Amazingly, printing worked much better to the printer than it did to the network switch."

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