dell3300A while back I bought a new Dell Laserprinter and the Dell 3300 Wireless Print Server.  I configured it flawlessly to talk to my  Linksys WRT54G with WAP enabled, and life was good.  My wife’s been using it nonstop, we mainly got it for the speed since she’s one of those people that likes to print out all her course-work.

Time passed, and I pretty much forgot about it.  It was a great piece of technology in that it’s use became seamless and I never had to touch it.  More time passed and I bought an Apple Airport Extreme to replace my WRT54G, and again it was great.  I made a complete switchout (kept the same WAP Keys, SSID and everything) and I didn’t have to touch a single piece of hardware.

Then Laura’s laptop, a Dell Inspiron, started to suffer from the dreaded Windows Bloat.  After 2 years of her using it, it was starting to become slow and sluggish, and prone to simple lock-ups.  An FFR was in-order.  Dug out the install disks, rebuilt the system, and all was good and pristene again.  Then I remembered I needed to setup the printer.  This began my problems.

I spent the next hour trying to get it working without using any special install software.  I couldn’t browse to the printer across the network, and manually entering the IP address didn’t seem to help either.  I could pull up the webpage in Explorer just fine, but no more than that.  Well, what’s the first thing you do when you have a technical problem?  Reboot the affected devices.

I rebooted the Dell 3300, for the first time since I bought it, and it refused to reconnect to the network.  I spent the next several hours power-cycling it, connecting it to my PC to try and reconfigure it, trying various other ritual incantations, but it would never see the Airport Extreme.

Well, I won’t bore you with all the details I took to find this solution, but I did finally find out.

The Solution:

  1. From my Mac (although I suppose the same is possible from a PC with the Airport configuration tool), I pulled up the Configuration for the Airport.
  2. I held down Ctrl while viewing the options for Network Speeds (Typically 802.11N 2.4Ghz, 802.11N 5Ghz, and 802.11B/G/N compatible).  This added a new option “802.11 B/G Only”.
  3. With that option selected, I went down to the Security dropdown and held control again which typically reads “None”, “WEP”, “WPA/WPA2″..
  4. There was a new option available “WPA” only, I selected that.
  5. Reboot the Airport Extreme.

And viola, it works.

Why?

Why does this fix it?  I’m not entirely sure.  I think that the Dell 3300 gets confused with the Airport’s combination of WPA & WPA2 into a single protocol, and can never authenticate.  If I switched to WEP or disabled security entirely, it worked.  And sadly, the only way to get the WPA-only option is by disabling N support.

It’s not a “perfect” solution, but it works.  In the near future i’ll probably put my WRT54G back online next to the Airport.  Then the printer will be able to authenticate to the WRT54G (and my Wife’s Laptop as well, she’s only B/G), but I can run my Macbook on the super-spiffy 802.11N 5Ghz.

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