Trying to create a static IP address

My boyfriend's laptop and my iMac share his Kodak printer over a private wifi connection, but it only works for one of us at a time. I've heard that creating a static IP address for one or both of the machines solves this problem, but I'm not sure how to go about doing that properly. Any tips?

Do you mean a static IP address for the printer itself or one or both of your machines? Is your boyfriend's machine a Mac?

I want to give our machines different IPs so that the printer can distinguish one from the other and print from both. Boyfriend has a pc, so I suppose I'll ask how I can create a static IP for MY machine. Shoulda clarified that.

the printer will distinguish who sent a job without a static IP. Going static simply adds complexity, it solves very, very few problems.. None outside high security environments with regard to workstations.

But the printer doesn't do that. If I install the driver and sync the printer, he can't use it, and if he installs the driver it only works for him, and I can't use it.

I had this problem at work: two laptops, trying to share a printer, and the printer could only find one machine at a time, and the problem was because the machines were sharing the same IP address. Our IT guy assigned a static ip to one of them, boom, solved the problem. Anyone know how?

reddipages said:

I had this problem at work: two laptops, trying to share a printer, and the printer could only find one machine at a time, and the problem was because the machines were sharing the same IP address. Our IT guy assigned a static ip to one of them, boom, solved the problem. Anyone know how?

Click to expand...

Something is very wrong with that picture, or you are misunderstanding what he did.

Your machines are both connected to a wireless router, yes? That wireless router hands out an IP address to each machine connected to it using a protocol called DHCP. DHCP dynamically hands out IP addresses for each host of the network, unless you allocate addresses out of its pool and assign them statically. Of course, once you do that, if the machine travels to a different network, you've got to reconfigure it for that network. Either way, you almost never want to use static IP, not only is it not necessary, but your flexibility is compromised.

How does the printer attach to the network? Does it have its own built-in ethernet connection or is it wireless? If anything, I would assign a static IP to the printer itself before I'd do the workstations.