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    Making a networked printer available to wifi clients

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved General pfSense Questions
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    • J
      jrunning
      last edited by

      [Mods: Feel free to move this to a different forum if I've filed it incorrectly. Thanks for your patience!]

      Hello all, I'm hoping you can help me configure my pfSense 2.0.1 box (ALIX.2D2) to make my networked printer available to wifi clients on my network. Please refer to this diagram:

      As you can see the ALIX is connected through its WAN interface to the modem, and clients connect via wifi to the ALIX. So far this works great and everyone can connect to the internet!

      However, I've hit a wall making the printer available to those clients. I know the printer's network connection is working, as I can connect directly to the modem via wifi and my computer (OS X Lion) sees the printer right away and I can print to it. However, when I'm connected to the ALIX I can't see the printer, I can't connect to it by entering its IP manually, I can't ping its IP, and so on. Neither can I ping with the utility in pfSense.

      I suspect this is a subnet or possibly a firewall issue, but none of my fiddling in those areas has solved it and I exceeded the limit of my networking expertise. In the end I would like anyone connected to the ALIX via WLAN to be able to print to the printer, and I would like mDNS (Bonjour) discovery to work as well.

      I'm hoping you can help me sort this out. Sincere thanks in advance for your assistance!
      network-diagram-2.png
      network-diagram-2.png_thumb

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      • stephenw10S
        stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
        last edited by

        To get bonjour working across interfaces you will probably need the Avahi package. However I would expect you to be able to see it via it's IP.
        Since your pfSense box is behind a router does it have a private subnet on its WAN? If so have you removed the block private networks rule?

        Is there some reason that your printer is not on the pfSense LAN?

        Steve

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