router gone haywire

[tman24]

I've had my 7800N for a couple of years (now running 1.06h), and it's been totally reliable. No problems at all. I use wireless security for all my clients (inc MAC filtering), but recently had the need to try and connect a wifi printer using WPS. I read up on what I needed to do, and initiated the process. Suffice to say, I've had a heck of a time trying to get it to work, but that isn't the main problem.

Ever since trying to use WPS, the router has been behaving erratically;

The web gui would sometimes not work. It will timeout regularly, and often look corrupted.
If I go into the wireless settings, a lot of the boxes that should be set are empty, with no options listed in the drop list
The wireless MAC filtering setting will show 'disabled', but still accepts clients connecting. If I try to re-enable it, I get the error 'getSelect: [object HTMLSelectElement]'
The browser will never completely load the page (the 'spinner' on the tab just keeps spinning)
If I try and restart the router(with current settings), occasionally it will revert to factory settings, and I'll need to restore from a backup config.

The router does connect to the Internet though, and seems to be working for most purposes. Wireless clients can connect, but as I said, the settings now look wrong, and won't allow me to change them.

It seems like something has got corrupted, so I could really do with some advice on how to get out of this mess. It really only happened since I tried using WPS, which I'm lead to believe, is meant to be very simple!!

[Tomken]

A factory reset and inputting the details afresh rather than from backed up settings would probably be better, but why don't you just set the printer up as a Fixed Host with a static IP address outside of the DHCP range - mine works fine like that.

[tman24]

Thanks for the tips. I might just have to do a factory reset/reflash/re-program and see how it goes. Don't think the router is going to recover fully from whatever's happened.

Trust me, I'd love to enter the printer IP details manually. It's a wifi printer (Epson XP-205), but it has no way of entering the details manually. To connect to the network, it only seems to work with WPS. I'll use USB for general printing, but network scanning/copying requires wifi...

[Tomken]

You assign it a static IP address from the router http://www.billion.uk.com/esupport/inde ... r-via-dhcp

You should have an item listed similar to Network Settings in the Epson folder in All programs and this will run you through the same steps as it would during the initial install to select just an USB connection or WiFi where you can use either.

For it to connect wirelessly you will need to go to the control panel on the printer and navigate via Setup/Network Settings where it should pick up your SSID for you to then enter the shared key and it should say if the set up was successful - if it isn't then print out the report and that will tell you where things had gone wrong.

The Setup should give you the option to Restore Default Settings which will clear any previous attempts and then you can navigate back to Network Settings.

You will be able to get its Mac address from the DHCP Table to enter into the router when you set up its static IP address.

The Event Manager may need to be manually started and pinned to the Taskbar and can be found in All Programs/Epson Software.

This worked fine for my Epson SX425W.

[tman24]

In my case I don't use the 7800N for DHCP duties. That's handled by my WHS. I'm totally happy with setting up static reservations, but that's not the problem. The printer is wifi ready, but doesn't have an LCD control panel (which all the Epson docs talk about). Certain models do, mine doesn't. The only way you can connect it to a secure wifi network (WPA2/PSK as mine is), seems to be via WPS PIN mode. You do a key combination on the front of the printer, and from the 7800N start the WPS going. They're meant to detect each other, and connect. I've managed to get it connected twice, but when the printer goes to sleep, it loses the connection and won't re-connect. Driving me crazy!

I think part of the problem might be that I have a powerline wifi extender in another part of the house. Same SSID but different channel. Got to try and check to see whether this is confusing things. I might try and turn off SSID broadcast on this just in case, but WPS on the 7800 seems really flaky, and it's left mine in quite a mess.

[dave_j]

I have this exact same printer and router combo and it works fine. I didn't set it up using WPS.

I can't remember the exact setup process but I think it involved the printer setting up a temporary peer-to-peer network which I connected to with my laptop. The laptop then seemed to copy my Wifi network credentials over to the printer.

The printer then rebooted and connected to my wifi network, and has been fine ever since.

Now that I think about i, maybe this is a form of WPS? All I know is that the printer didn't negotiate a connection with the router initially.

[tman24]

Yes, that's peer-WPS, creating an ad-hoc wifi network between the printer and the PC. Never had much joy with that either.

In the end, I think I finally managed to get it working. I switched off the wireless extender, and went through a full reset/reflash/reconfigure of the 7800N. That all seems ok now, and I went through the WPS setup one more time. After about 4 attempts the printer connected (remember, it would always fail again after powering off/on). Once it had connected, I noticed Epson had just released a new version of their Netconnect s/w. I ran this, and it found the printer. I could then configure the wireless settings from there, and save them to the printer (essentially, saving the PSK on the printer). I made sure that the printers MAC was added to the 7800N MAC filtering (but not on the extender). Once all this was saved, I powered off/on the printer, and it seemed to connect fine (not using WPS now remember!). I then powered on the extender, and tried the printer off/on again, and it connected fine.

What a chore! Next time I'll get a printer with an LCD screen!