ARP table entry disappears and printer goes offline - HP OfficeJet 8710

[DaWidget]

Hi

I have been having an issue with printing for years.

I have bought HP Officejet Pro 8600 (great printer except for the networking issues), then 8610 and then 8710
All have suffered from the same problem

The problem is very nice put by @Srmiles in this post OfficeJet-8720-ignores-ARP-request

... but this was never directly answered and the solution given

        1) did not explain the cause

        2) did not resolve the issue (for me)

To define the problem again (which all the above printers have suffered from)

You are printing fine then after a period of time the printer stops responding to ARP requests and so cannot be contacted and so goes offline. Even the HP Smart diagnostics cannot find it (obviously because it not responding to ARP nothing can find it).

Putting a static entry for the printer in the ARP table fixed it until Win 10 and at which time MS makes it very difficult to make manual ARP changes (I presume for security reasons).

Simple problem (if a little technical) but nowhere have I seen a complete and effective answer to this issue - especially not from HP (and I have been looking on and off for 6 years).  

Please, let's start with the HP Officejet 8710, if anyone has any solutions to this (like a bug fix or a special firmware release or a hack through the keypad or a hack in Win10 registry or something like that) I would be very grateful.  Note: I have reset and turned off and reinstalled and diagnosed to death. I have tried this https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c06184808 and it did not resolve the problem long term.

The problem looks like a bug in HP firmware. 

Thanks in advance

[Lil_Boy_Blue]

Hi

Surely the ARP is in your router/switch and not local and not a HP glitch.

Like mine in my VM modem/router

LBB-PC	48:48:48:48:48:27	192.168.0.11/24	70.41	Wireless frequency 2.4 GHz WhiffyOne
Bhave	BE:BE:BE:BE:BE:55	192.168.0.13/24	70.16	Wireless frequency 2.4 GHz Whiffy1too

However if you lose the local cache on your PC then the device will be unreachable as you say.

Wikipedia helped me...

Computer 1 has to send a broadcast ARP request message (destination FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF MAC address), which is accepted by all computers on the local network, requesting an answer for 192.168.0.55.

Computer 2 responds with an ARP response message containing its MAC and IP addresses. As part of fielding the request, Computer 2 may insert an entry for Computer 1 into its ARP table for future use.

Computer 1 receives and caches the response information in its ARP table and can now send the packet.

However this may help...

https://superuser.com/questions/1201023/arp-cache-location-on-windows-10

So either the OS is filling up its table and removing the least used, or the printer is doing the same.

[DaWidget]

Yo lil bb

Thanks for replying.

I need to make it clear for those that read this in the future.
Your process is correct, computer 2 (the printer) replies to the broadcast with its MAC address which computer 1 (your PC) saves in its ARP table. All ethernet connected machines have an internal (not on the router) ARP table in memory (normally dynamically created as it gets answers from the network but can be statically set by the user too).
The ARP table allows it to lookup the MAC address from the IP address and then make the layer 2 call to the appropriate hardware (ie the printer WIFI/ETH card).

I am certain 22 entries would not be enough to fill up an ARP table (even in Windose) but perhaps someone can confirm this.

But here is the thing, I have run a trace on the network several times and I see the ARP broadcast go out (from the PC) but I see no ARP reply (giving the MAC address), as one would expect from the printer.  It does not matter if the printer is connected to hub or to a switch, same issue (I do not connect the printer to the Internet router as I have a firewall before the Internet router - so the hubs and switches are on my internal network). The only thing I have not tried is a direct ether cable to the printer (but even if that worked it would not resolve the issue for me).

D