I'm in a college setting trying to use the printer connected to my desktop PC (running Windows 7) with my laptop running Ubuntu 12.04. Here's a few preliminary details;
- Host computer (Windows) name: Alex-PC
- Printer share name: 332
- Workgroup name: WORKGROUP
- Network security: WPA2-Enterprise
- Encryption: AES
In the recent past (last few days) I've had it working just fine. I added the printer via the SAMBA option and entered the following in the field;
smb://Alex-PC/332
and it worked perfectly and consistently for a few days. Just recently, that's stopped. It always works if I enter the IP address (which I can also ping via terminal):
smb://172.26.xx.xxx/332
but I don't want to have to change the printer address every time my host computer changes IPs, and I don't want to have to set a static IP to my host computer.
Entering the following helped once or twice:
smb://WORKGROUP/Alex-PC/332
But after a print job or two it just stopped again. Every time it fails to work, it gives me the following error:
Idle - Unable to connect to CIFS host, will retry in 60 seconds...
So, to make a long story short, up until now I've been able to connect to my host Windows computer using the Windows computer's name. Now, I can only connect reliably via the IP address, which being an IP address is prone to change. Any idea what might be going on here?
edit; It's also worth nothing that my printer/file sharing setting is enabled in Windows, and that even with Network Discovery enabled I cannot find my PC or printer using the browser in Ubuntu.
