[bbales]

I have a Canon pixma 4000 plugged into the USB port of an Airport Extreme Base Station. Both my desktop and my laptop (12-in PB) use the printer and it's worked just fine. Yesterday, it stopped working because it was out of ink. Today, in an effort to find out which cartridge, I tried to start to print, just to get the ink message. This time, from both machines, it told me the printer was not connected properly and to make sure it was turned on and connected. I unplugged the printer and the base station and tried again. This time, the printer worked fine from the laptop (wirelessly) but NOT from my desktop. If I connect the cable directly into the USB hub (and not the AE base station) it works from the desktop (but obviously it's not going to work from the laptop). I've checked the cable; it's not that. I've tried turning off the base station for about 5 minutes and then reconnecting. I've tried restarting the desktop.

I can still connect to the Internedt from the laptop, so obviously the base station is still working on some level.

Anyone have any other ideas as to why the printer suddenly won't work from the base station?

I think this is the proper forum, but I'm also going to post in peripherals.

Thanks.

[ghporter]

Cross posting is a Bad Thing. This is indeed the right forum to start out with.

What have you done with the PRINTER? Have you cycled power? Done a reset of any kind on it? Done a reset (power cycle) on the Extreme?

[bbales]

Just as an update, since you're always so good about helping. Yes, I'd tried the printer and trying to reset it, to no avail. I THINK the problem was with the base station, but don't know for sure. I finally just hooked the printer directly to my desktop, with intentions of trying to fix things later. We just didn't have wireless printing, which was a pain.

Then several days later, we had power flickering issues and it blasted Internet access on only SOME machines, which was very weird, including my desktop, which is the main entry point. Interestingly, my laptop had Internet access just fine! So I shut everything down, unplugged and replugged router and base station and then just restarted everything. And everything now works again, including wireless printing.

Still don't know exactly what happened, but I do know it's fixed. (And the printer, unfortunately, does not have a reset button, by the way.)

[ghporter]

What happened was your base station was being wonky, and the power cycle (fully turning it all off) corrected that. Remember that all theses devices, modems, routers, wireless routers, etc., are tiny microcomputers. And unfortunately their OS and program code is not written to "mission critical" standards. They suffer memory leaks and lost pointers and all sorts of other things. One really common problem is losing routing tables and DHCP tables, which will cause SOME computers on the network to have problems and/or problems getting to SOME sites. The FIRST thing to do when you have a problem that MAY involve your router is to do a power cycle on the router. ALWAYS.