Router Archives - Downs Consulting

Best Home Small Business Printer

May 10, 2016February 20, 2016 by Randy Downs

Best Home Small Business Printer

Best Home Small Business Printer – where do I find one? The problem these days is that there are too many choices.

While a color laser printer used to be out of reach for home and small businesses they can be had for a reasonable price these days.

The initial cost of the Best Home Small Business Printer is just the beginning.

Keeping them in ink or toner can be expensive.

Bells and Whistles for Best Home Small Business Printer

Adding to the confusion of finding the Best Home Small Business Printer is all the bells and whistles that are available.

WiFi
FAX
ADF (Automatic Document Feeder)
Ethernet
print-shop-quality color prints
laser-sharp black and color text
high-speed prints
multiple paper trays
monthly duty cycle (pages/month)
auto 2-sided print/copy/scan/fax.

Wireless Printers

Wireless printers allows printing from tablets (e.g., iPad) and

smartphones (e.g., iPhone). Not all printers make this easy.

Some printers may require mobile devices to print to the cloud (Internet).

While this can be useful we want our Best Home Small Business Printer to connect directly to.

Some may require you to print to their cloud or allow popular clouds like Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive.

Printing to the cloud may not be a concern if you have high-speed Internet but it might be a problem if you depend on a cellular data plan to upload the files.

There are also security concerns for uploading sensitive documents to the cloud.

Downs Consulting recommends a wireless printer that doesn’t require printing to the cloud. We prefer our Best Home Small Business Printer to print directly via WiFi.

Printing to the cloud is a nice feature but we don’t want all our print jobs to go through it.

Wi-Fi

Wireless setup sounds nice. In theory you setup your Best Home Small Business Printer anywhere you have

power and WiFi reception and you are “good to go”.

The printer forums are littered with complaints about printers connected or rather not connected via WiFi.

It’s common for WiFi to drop the connections. It’s similar to mobile phone connections.

Dropping a connection in the middle of a big print job could cause problems. Maybe you would have to start all over again after waiting minutes for it to enter the print queue.

The reality is that WiFi is not as dependable as an Ethernet connection.

Our advice is to use a wired connection if at all possible. This requires an Ethernet connections which some models may not have.

Ethernet

This is our preferred method of connecting our printer. We

can still use WiFi to connect to our mobile devices.

Downs Consulting recommends a networked printer that is not tied to a computer.

Many printers limit their functions if connected via USB.

Some printers may not have this capability.

Footprint and Noise

A noisy printer right next to you in a small office is no small intrusion on

your space.

Likewise, a huge printer is not going to very welcome either.

While there are plenty of small printers they tend to skimp on some features.

A small printer may be better for a Home user that doesn’t need all the “bells and whistles”.

When we settled on our Best Home Small Business Printer we still had to convince our office that we had room for it.

Printer Maintenance Costs – Ink & Toner

A major concern is operating costs. It’s common to see the ink/toner

replacement cost more than the printer.

Printers often come with starter

supplies that don’t last as long as the standard capacity.

Usually, you can find high-yield supplies that are a better buy in the long run.

It also saves on the aggravation of running to the store for supplies.

Some printers may refuse to work at all if one of their cartridges are low. This is particularly frustrating if you don’t need that cartridge for the job you have queued up.

New Color Inkjet printers can be up to 50% cheaper to operate than a color laser.

Review Sites

Review sites are a good place to start looking for available features, costs,

and buyer or editor opinions.

Preferably the site has lost of reviews so the overall score can’t be skewed one way or another by a few one-sided reviews.

If there are not many reviews you may not get an accurate assessment.

Likewise, the site should not have a vested interest in the sale of the product and reviewers should be able to post sincere remarks.

A lack of disparaging or complimentary remarks could be a sign of bias.

Consumer Reports

Consumer Reports is a great resource for buying appliances like this but you need a subscription to see their reviews online. They compile statistics on the main categories including maintenance cost, print quality, photo quality, and speed.

You can usually get a free trial for online or magazines. The magazines come with a buyers guide and is a good resource in itself.

The Consumer Reports interactive video below offers some good advice. You can click on the sections you are most interested in.

Other Review Sites

Some websites like PC Magazine have editor and user reviews.

Amazon has good prices and user reviews.

Bad Reviews

No printer is perfect in every way and we found bad reviews on the best-rated ones.

Some bad reviews may have been from lemons or simply technical errors. Some may have had issues with their networks. Some may have been malicious.

Laser Printers

Since some inkjet printers are cheaper to run than a color laser we would

not recommend a color laser as a Best Home Small Business Printer.

If you are only concerned about printing text then you may want to consider buying a monochrome laser printer.

Text quality has long been the domain of the laser printer but even here inkjet printers are competitive with text print quality and speed.

Inkjet Printers

For us, all roads point to a Multi-Function inkjet printer which is somewhat disappointing.

Just when the costs of color laser have become affordable, inkjet

Inkjet printer Downs Consulting — Inkjet printer – Downs Consulting

technology has become competitive in all respects.

We shouldn’t complain since keeping up with multiple toners for the color laser is not a task we would want.

Inkjet ink itself is expensive enough.

Compromises for the Best Home Small Business Printer

If you find a printer that is perfect in every way then it is likely a budget breaker.

Consequently, you have to decide what’s the most important features you need and what you can do without.

Our Best Home Small Business Printer requirements:

Network connection using our LAN (local area )
Print laser-sharp text
Print color and text
FAX
Scan
Low Cost
Reasonable speed
Reasonable maintenance costs – Save on ink or toner
Multiple Paper Trays

Nice to have features

ADF – Automatic Document Feeder
Automatic 2-sided print/copy/scan/fax
Easy printing from tablets and smartphones – Android, Apple & Windows products
Fast print speeds
Stunning graphics and images

Why DHCP Ain’t as Good as it Used to Be

April 26, 2016January 19, 2015 by Randy Downs

Why DHCP ain’t as good as it used to be.

DHCP used to be the go-to protocol when setting up computers and printers.

These days you may want to use static IPs for printers and maybe even computers if you user RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol).

DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) allows a server to hand out IPs and network information to devices joining your network. Often this is handled by a router. The router may be built into your cable modem on a home network.

Every device on your network requires a unique IP so that the requests for network and web resources get routed correctly.

The alternative is to set up static IPs, in which case, you manually enter pertinent information like the gateway (router), DNS servers, and a static IP that is not in the DHCP IP pool or previously assigned.

DHCP is much simpler especially is you have lots of devices coming and going. In fact, it is easier to enter a static IP after first reviewing a CMD prompt of ipconfig for the DHCP assigned values.

On a domain, this is best done by the server.

System

For our discussion, we will assume a small single server (server) but the principles apply to most DHCP servers.

Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard
DC (domain controller) for corp.domain.com
AD (Active Directory)
connected to the Internet via a cable router.

Vital Information

The vital pieces of information that DHCP must supply on a domain are the IP, gateway router, DNS servers, and domain.

DHCP scope options
003 router -192.168.0.1
006 DNS servers – 192.168.0.253 (our DC)
015 domain name – corp.domain.com

address pool : 192.168.0.50 -192.168.0.99

Typically we save a few IPs for static machines like servers, routers, and printers. For our system, we will reserve IPs below 192.168.0.50. For larger networks you may need multiple scopes and/or wider ranges.

The domain name should match the domain name in DNS forward lookup zone. You can find DNS & DHCP sections in Server Manager. Expand sections and right-click to select properties to find & edit information.

Troubleshooting DHCP

For our demo system, we are assuming that server was in another domain prior (domain.com) to becoming DC (domain controller) for corp.domain.com. Since DNS forwarder shows corp.domain.com as the domain we will edit our DHCP name accordingly.

Our demo system also had a bogus router 0.0.0.0 so we delete the information and add our gateway 192.168.0.1.

These sorts of problems occur when the server goes from member server to domain controller of another domain.

In Conclusion

DHCP is still very useful so you will want to take advantage of it as much as possible.

Tip: Even if you use static IPs you may want to look at something that’s already on your network to see how DHCP set it up.

Slow Loading Websites & Resources

March 26, 2016January 19, 2015 by Randy Downs

Network Issues

Slow Loading Websites & Resources

DNS (Domain Name System) is a service that translates website & computer names to ips (i.e., Internet Protocol addresses) so you can use friendly domain names like Google.com & Randy-laptop.

On a Windows domain this service is handled by the DC (Domain Controller).

IPs – IPv4

Note that every device on your network should have a unique ip. A duplicate ip causes confusion. Only the 1st device to secure an ip will be able to access the network.

Likewise many websites have a unique ip but this is not always the case. If your test website uses HTTP Secure(e,g, https://www.google.com) then it has a unique website.

IPv4 is the easier protocol to deal with when accessing resources.

Applications

This article specifically applies to a Server 2008 R2 Standard single server domain with AD (Active Directory) but the principles can be applied to DNS servers everywhere.

A Server 2008 R2 Standard single server domain should point only to itself for DNS and not an external server. The rest of the domain should also point to this server. There should be no reason to have a forwarder in a single server domain but you might run across one if a server has been removed somehow.

Machines with static ips will have the local ip for the DNS server. Machines assigned ips via DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) will get that ip from the DHCP server.

Troubleshooting Domain DNS

If your clients on the domain access computer resources like network shares & websites without issues then your DNS is working properly. If on the other hand it takes a long time for a website or network share to load then you may want to investigate DNS.

A simple way to troubleshoot DNS is to try accessing the ip rather than the FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name). Chances are you don’t know the ip of the resource but you can ping it from a CMD prompt.

The examples below we are pinging FQDN cisco.com & Randy-laptop with the -4 flag set (return IPv4). Once we have the ip we can try accessing these resources.

In the case of cisco.com we put the ip 72.163.4.161 in our browser. If the page loads for the ip and not the FQDN then we have a DNS problem.

In the case of the network resource, we can try connecting with a net use command. Assuming you have permission to access the save share on Randy-laptop then the net use command should connect drive X. If you can access the share via ip but not FQDN then we have issues with DNS.

Examples:

C:\Users\Randy>ping cisco.com -4

Pinging cisco.com [72.163.4.161] with 32 bytes of data:

C:\Users\Randy>ping Randy-laptop -4

Pinging Randy-Laptop [192.168.1.25] with 32 bytes of data:

Connecting to network share using ip:

C:\Users\Randy>net use x: \\192.168.1.25\save
The command completed successfully.

DNS Problem Forwarder

In our example we are going to assume that the network is slow and resources drag. Troubleshooting leads us to believe there is a DNS problem. Looking at the properties of our DNS we find a forwarder.

We know the forwarder should not be there so we remove it & restart the DNS service. This is more likely to occur when you remove a DNS server from your domain. It can also occur when you move your DC to a new domain leaving the old DNS server behind.

Why Network Troubleshooting Will Change Your Life

April 26, 2016September 2, 2014 by Randy Downs

Network Troubleshooting

Why Network Troubleshooting Will Change Your Life.

OK maybe it won’t change your life but it will demand a considerable amount of your time until you get it running properly.

Windows domain best practice is to use the domain server/s for DNS & DHCP. While these features are typically enabled on routers they cause a lot of grief on a Windows domain. Routers may know where the main DNS servers are on the Internet but they have no idea where your network servers are.

Consequently, the router will start looking for your server on the Internet 1st and then start interrogating your network. That yields an unnecessary lag time for searches for machines that are on your network.

This article primarily addresses a single server domain but the principles are similar for larger environments.

DNS – Domain Name System

If you are experiencing a lag time trying to find or connect to your server using a Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) then your network may be misconfigured. Best practice is to have your DNS server reference itself and all the other PCs get their information from the local DNS server.

Since we are mainly focused on single-server domains then DNS will be on the domain controller.

Example:

domain – example.com

LAN – 192.168.0.xxx

gateway – 192.168.0.1

server.example.com – 192.168.0.2

DNS – 192.168.0.2

Once we setup the server static IP to use itself for DNS then the server won’t have any problems finding machines on the local network.

DHCP – Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol

The easy way to setup PCs on your network is to use DHCP. This tells the device where your DNS server, gateway are in addition to assigning an IP address from a pool. For a home setup it’s easy enough to let the Internet router take care of these responsibilities. For a domain, however, we want our server to handle DNS and DHCP too.

We will want to disable DNS & DHCP on the router (gateway) and add the roles to the server.

The DHCP server will issue is from our address pool and set the client PCs DNS to use the server ip for DNS.

Static ip Addresses

Machines like the server need static ips so that we always know what address it has. If you allow devices to use DHCP addresses then they may or may not get the same ip every time which can lead to more network problems for devices you connect to via an ip.

In our example, the server is at 192.168.0.2 on our Local Area Network (LAN). That means we had to assign an ip outside of the DHCP pool, subnet mask, gateway and DNS server (itself).

Best practice is to use a static ip for your server so we don’t end up with some sort of conflict. If other devices use static ips, then you will need to adjust the DNS on those devices if they are not set to your server.

In Conclusion

Network troubleshooting may not change your life but it will definitely improve the quality of time you spend on your attached computers.

How Remote Desktop Connections Make You a Better Worker

April 26, 2016June 13, 2014 by Randy Downs

How remote desktop connections make you a better worker.

Using a remote desktop connection lets you effectively get to work faster and address the situation ASAP.

Creating Remote Desktop Connections

Remote Desktop Connections allow you to remotely control host machines via the magic of the Internet and RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol).

For the purposes of this article we will assume you are connecting from your home PC or laptop to a remote office (remote host). This means that we will need access to the router at the office.

Hypothetical Remote Host:

FQDN – mymail.somecollege.edu
the default port for RDP 3389
no VPN (Virtual Private Network)
static IP
connect to a host on the WAN (WAN – Wide Area Network)

Typically we would ping the FQDN to make sure the IP is valid. Since this is a non-existent machine that won’t work so we’ll pretend it translates to a usable IP.

Remote Desktop Connections Home or Work

If we wanted to control our PC from work then our PC at home would be the remote host and we would need to access the router at home.

If your PC or laptop is connected to the host’s LAN then you could possibly access host via a private IP on your (e.g., 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x,). Private IPs are not routable so only work on the LAN.

Setup PC or Laptop

When we setup Remote Desktop Connections we need the IP address or fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of the host. You can usually find your public ip by visiting a site like WhatsMyIp.

You can get to the Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) program by clicking Start and typing “Remote Desktop Connection”. You won’t have to type more than a few letters before you will see the program.

Once you have the RDC window open you can enter the FQDN or the public ip of the PC in the Computer field.

I prefer to save my connections for future use by clicking Show Options. This will allow you to save the User Name and credentials. If this is a shared machine then you should click “Always ask for credentials“.

Setup Remote Host Machine

The host has to be prepared for this remote connection so we have to enable remote control. You get to Remote Settings by right clicking My Computer and selecting Properties. Allowing Remote Control of your PC opens the RDP port in the Windows Firewall for you.

We will give our host machine a static ip of 192.168.1.100 so it can be found by our router when we connect via RDP. Typically machines use DHCP to get the private IP gateway, DNS, and other network information. If you run ipconfig from a CMD prompt you will see the information you need to setup a static IP.

If you have a software firewall like Zone Alarm you will have to allow the incoming IP or block of IPs. This can be a problem if you connect from many places or your IP changes often. If that’s the case a remote control application like TeamViewer will be much easier to setup.

Setup Router on Host’s LAN

OK, the host is setup and you have an RDC connection. The final piece of the puzzle is to add the router NAT (Network Address Translation). The router is the gateway to the Internet at large. The public IP of our entity mymail.somecollege.edu is probably the same IP as the gateway.

When the RDC connection connects to the public IP it’s up to the router or a VPN to find the host machine. In our case, it’s the router that will determine where this host is. The location of the settings vary but it usually something like “Port Forwarding”. The router will also determine if only your home IP is allowed to make this connection or if it’s open to the public. Strong passwords will help secure the connection if the host is open to the public.

For RDP, the protocol used by Remote Desktop Connections, we need to forward traffic to the private IP of our host using port 3389. If we specified a port in our connection then this port would have to be forwarded to the private IP of our host and change the port to 3389.

Example:

RDC using default port 3389
mymail.somecollege.edu –> forwards traffic to port 3389 to port 3389 on the host machineRDC using port 3390
mymail.somecollege.edu:3390 –> forwards traffic to port 3390 to port 3389 on the host machine

It’s also possible to hack the registry port for the specific machine for RDP but most routers handle this for you.

In Conclusion

You really are a better worker using remot desktop connections so it’s worth the effort to get them working.

Note: There are alternatives like Teamviewer and LogMeIn which are easier to use but can be costly.

Teamviewer is free for personal use.