[jamescostian]

It could be your router giving it a new IP address, but the printer itself hopefully has a static MAC address. Check your router settings for static IP assignment, they may be under a section called DHCP. Over there you could give it a static IP address for its current MAC address

EDIT: this comment no longer makes sense after the parent comment was edited. It used to be explicitly asking for help and didn't mention any solutions like static IPs, nor did it spell out a general remark about how this complexity in consumer electronics is bad

[breadwinner]

You missed the point. I wasn't asking for help on how to assign a static IP address. My point was that ordinary people shouldn't have to know what an IP address is, let alone what a static IP address is, in this day and age.

[kop316]

For the record, printers have been so bad with firmware/software that it literally inspired RMS to make GNU: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/201cthe-printer-story201...

[crumpled]

That's wishful thinking, imo.

If you want to have a network, someone needs to know a bit of networking. Or you need someone you can call who does.

Don't get mad at the printer for what your router is doing to its IP address. This day and age isn't as advanced as you'd like it to be, or you need a new router that does what you expect.

[breadwinner]

Thankfully people at Apple thought this can be easier. They came up with Bonjour... Bonjour is apparently also known as ZeroConf [1].

Microsoft is behind the times.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-configuration_networking

[trimethylpurine]

Bonjour struggles to find printers much more than Windows. My Windows users just click add printer and it just works. And let's not talk about file shares. Macs literally can't connect to any file shares except Windows ones (since AFP is out of support), and then only with Samba, and only with Apple's botched implementation of Samba which crashes, because it needs to create metafile databases on said shares, if a share has too many files. Try opening a file share with 20k+ images in the root from your latest Mac. Seems to me, as a mixed OS business operator, that it's Apple that's behind the times. Even out of service Chromecast devices and decades old Linux distros are better at network discovery than Bonjour.

[mortenjorck]

I can’t comment on the file share tangent, but in my experience with a Bonjour-equipped Brother laser printer over the past eight or so years, I don’t think I can recall it failing to connect once.

Granted, I’m on a Mac and I print about five times a year, so YMMV.

[trimethylpurine]

I don't doubt that a one computer, one printer, scenario is any problem for any OS. You'll see who the ugly one is when the kids play together. File sharing isn't a tangent. The purpose of Bonjour is to couple printing and file sharing as a network discovery protocol.

[marcod]

The only thing I know about Bonjour is that I had to uninstall it every time after installing iTunes on my PC.

[devmor]

I used to do that too because I didn’t know what it was or why I would want it. Now I intentionally have it installed without iTunes since its so handy.

[crumpled]

Chances are it's installed right now. It's bundled with so many things.

[kube-system]

Part of the commoditization process for consumer products is that they are made to be user friendly for non-experts. Most other networked devices have already done this. Nobody needs to know how to configure /var/lib/dhcpd/dhcpd.leases to use an iPad on the router that Xfinity provides.

[bombcar]

It's actually sometimes sold as a "security" feature - short DHCP leases with no memory.

Which is kinda silly, if the router hasn't needed to give the IP to another client, just remember it forever.

[kube-system]

If people start using dynamic IPs as if they are static, when they really aren't, they're just setting themselves up for failure the next time the devices reboots or resets. It's better to either use static addressing if you want static addressing, or use DNS if you don't know what the IP is going to be.