We are using a Microtik HapLite router in a public hall. My android phone and “Brother” printer are connected to the same wiFi network on the same router. I can see the printer Mac address in the Microtik software. Using the "Brother “Iprint and scan software” the phone can’t see the printer on the network. I guess there must be something in the Microtik settings preventing the printer from being visible to other devices.
Is there anything I can try to make the printer visible on the network? As a newbie, I will need step by step instructions, preferably with screenshots.
Your advice would be appreciated.
Check the setting of default-forwarding property of wireless interface. It has to be enabled (i.e. set to yes) for wireless stations to be able to talk to each other. Default setting is enabled, but somebody might have changed it to disabled (it’s a good setting for guest wireless network as it isolates wireless stations from each other).
With the command below in the router terminal you will activate default-forward on interface 0 (zero).
Default Forward is to allow communication between all devices that are connected to the router’s WiFi. If you do not intend to release it to everyone, in this case you will have to use an access list to release more specific devices.
interface wireless set default-forwarding=yes numbers=0
Update: I searched in the Microtik Haplite software and found the setting to allow all default forwarding. It took a while, because on this router the settings are found in a different place.
After enabling and saving I can see the printer on my phone and it prints just fine. Problem solved! Thank you all very much for your help.
Just out of interest, is there a way to allow only the printer to be visible and send and receive to all phones on the network, but at the same time to disallow phones from seeing other phones on the network for added security? Maybe it’s not possible, but just a thought.
Wireless ACLs have property forwarding … so you can set this property per wireless client. I have never set this property in ACLs so I don’t know if setting it on printer only would allow communication of all wireless clients with printer or not.
Sounds like you need separate private and guest subnets with their own Wi-Fi interface. Very common scenario where everyone can see/access devices on the private network but on the guest, you can only access the internet, not other devices on the same access point.
Thank you mxk and robmaltsystems for your replies . I will look into the possibility of having a guest Wifi network with forwarding disabled, and another Wifi network with forwarding enabled. Thank you all for your help and suggestions.
