Printer behind NAT

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I have a Funbox 6 Router, which works fine. Unfortunately it does not cover all required area with WiFi. Happily i have Ethernet cable connected to the Router with the other end in the not covered area.

I bought "Pix-Link Mini Router". This is small WiFi device that has two Ethernet rj45 interfaces. Additionally it dos not require PoE, as is directly plugged into wall socket.

Pix Link can work in 3 modes.

  1. WiFi repeater. It repeat the same WiFi on same LAN subnet, but is connected to main router wirelessly.
  2. Access point. It broadcast its own WiFi but is connected to main by cable and shares same subnet.
  3. Router. It broadcasts its own WiFi and with its own subnet. But it is connected to main by cable. And it additionally support one Ethernet device connected it self.

I wanted to connect there Samsung C480FW printer by wire. The printer has wake on lan option, which works well on cable. Sadly I never managed to get it work on WiFi . Windows 10 always shows it offline and required restarting the printing service.

So i ended with using Repeater in a router option.

Now the problem is accessing printer from the main network, as the Repeater firewalls connections.

I gave static address for the printer and configured NAT for default printing ports. Sadly it did not work. Next I used wireshark to sniff traffic during print and scan operations.

I ended with forwarding ports 8018 161 6498 38438 27663 18864 and additionally printer port 80 as 8080, to control it with browser .

Moreover the repeater has DMZ host option. DMZ may refer to different aspects. In my case setting DMZ host mean forwarding all non captured traffic to that host. So I set printer address there.

With this setup printing to NAT works well. Moreover printers configured to use translated Repeater address works both from mainnet and subnet. This is helpful for laptops that could move from one network to another.

Next time I hope for the main router to support MESH. Which combines all devices to single IP /WiFi network while still allowing wire connections.

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