How do I enable keep-alive on HP Officejet Pro 8600?

[shawnwhaley]

You may benefit from giving your printer a static IP address. It could be that some of us have a faulty printer or network card and your printer may be fine. 

Or, if you have advance settings in your wireless router, look for a setting where you can assign an IP address via Mac address. Find your printer's wireless MAC address by opening the IP address in a browser window and looking at the wireless card properties. 

Letting your router assign the IP address is better than you assigning it manually, because the router will save this information in a table that allows other devices to access it. That's a little over-simplified, but it's worth taking the time to do.

If you need any help with this, let me know.

[gdollar]

Thanks for the response.

I printed the document that is called the "HP Network Configuration Page" at time of installation and again just now. The data is identical including the ip address. It lists the MAC address of the printer and so I have that already. BTW I have never rebooted the printer since I installed it. Does this MAC Address look right?

84:34:97:b0:84:8a

You suggest fixing the ip address via the MAC address and I don't know how to do that. Also you say that it's better for the router to set the ip Address because it stores the info in a table and allows other computers to access it so why would I manually set it?

Can you let me have the instructions on how to do this?

Thanks

[shawnwhaley]

It's basically two different methods for accomplishing the same thing. The first (setting the address manually) is more direct. If you scroll back a few posts in this disscussion, others have provided instructions on how to do that.

The second method (assigning the IP in your router) is more complicated and your ability is dependant upon whether your wireless router supports it. Again, there are advantages to this - one of them being that the router will always know the most direct path to your printer. If you can give me the model number of your router, I'll try to look it up and let you know if I can help. 

But, before we do all of that, you may simply want to try assigning a static IP address and see if that fixes your issue. Simple solutions are good.

[gdollar]

It's just not easy to do that right now. I've set the weekend as the last day and I warned Staples that it may be coming back. It does print very well when it works and I like the functions.

[gdollar]

I have a Linksys WRT 54 G router. I know it's old but has never let me down and has not limited my speed when I compare with other routers.

Gdollar

[gdollar]

I have checked on the Linksys router and it does not support static wireless ip addresses. It allows three wired static addresses from what I can tell.

Gdollar

[shawnwhaley]

You're right - that's a great router. I've probably set up a dozen or more for myself and others. 

It does not support IP address reservations natively. If you ever get to the point where you want to go full geek, check out dd-wrt.com. It let's you modify your router's firmware for more customizable features. Don't try it unless you have a spare. 

[VisionAiry]

Thank you for your understanding!  I am surprised demo-mode doesn't keep the wireless card awake.  I can only offer two other suggestions. This may completely help keep it awake: connect it via ethernet to the router to completely disable the wireless card.  You will know when it has been successfully setup when the blue wireless light is off.  I had a customer do this and when I called him back, he said this seemed to have fixed it.

This suggestion is simply my work-around.  I really like using the HP ePrint Driver.  You can install it on any computer (Mac or Windows) and if that is the method in which you print from your iPad even when the printer appears offline, then this will help. It uses the exact same feature.  You download/install it and use it as a driver by selecting it from the print command in your program, just like the Officejet 8600 driver.  

The first time you use it, you have to enter in the printer's eprint email address and this will save it under the recently used section.  I use this driver for many reasons but not for this reason.  I really hope this helps you!

[gdollar]

OK I had a dyslexic moment. When the printer was installed it had an IP address of 192.168.1.140 and now it is 192.168.1.104.

I have checked all the computers in the home office on the wireless system as well as my Sonos and they are all different. Currently all are working but it did drop one of the computers this morning. I rebooted it and it worked but the computers IP address remained the same as before when it wouldn't communicate with the printer.

Maybe when the first IP address was set it put it well away from all other devices at 192.168.1.140.

Can I use the manual setting for the HP printer's IP address and set it to .140 instead of .104 without touching the router? Or does it need to be set on the router for it to be effective?

gdoller

[VisionAiry]

I have always done that step in the printer's embedded web server (http:/192.168.1.104).  You can set it to any IP address you feel works best for you.  Once you click apply, you may lose connection with that EWS, because the IP address is going to change to the one you want and the only way to access it again is to type the new IP address in the URL (http:/192.168.1.140).