That said, regardless of the IP range of your router, you’ll need to know how to configure your printer on your network.Īlthough the Brother HL-2270DW documentation and web site lists multiple ways to configure the printer for wireless access, and even provides a software “wizard”, we found the only successful way to get the printer on line was to use their web based administration page, and even that requires multiple steps. We also acknowledge that it’s possible (and may people do), change the DHCP settings on their Airport routers to the more common 192.168.1.xxx range when they set up their networks and we suspect, had we done that initially, we might not have run into this issue at all. Updated models with a similar design are available for only a little more than $100.00 and we wouldn’t think twice about getting another one if and when this one finally reaches the end of its useful life. Although now a discontinued model, we have owned this printer for several years and it has been a workhorse, pumping out thousands of pages without so much as a paper jam. It wouldn’t be fair to say that there is something wrong with the printer.

That also explains why the printer immediately started to work again when we returned our Airport Extreme router to the network. All of the other routers set an IP range of 192.168.1.xxx which the printer could never connect to. Moving from an Airport n router to an Airport ac router was an easy switch because they both use the same IP range, so the printer was able to get its previously assigned address. You may recall that we initially used an Airport Extreme Base Station (read our review here) as our router, which by default, set an IP range of 10.0.1.xxx. As a result, when we changed the router, the printer’s NIC was not able to accept the new IP address assigned to it. Even the initial set-up requires the use of a web based administration panel and that “hard codes” the assigned IP address to the printer’s network interface card (“NIC”). These printers do not have any kind of built-in control panel or display so there is no way for the user to interact with the settings. Initially we thought the problem was with the router but after having it happen multiple times we conceded that the problem must lie with the printer.Īfter doing some additional troubleshooting and research, we determined that this issue applies, not only to the Brother HL-2270DW but to all of the similar style Brother Laser Printers in this series.

If you have been following our reviews on Wi-Fi routers (read them here), you know that one constant has been our inability to get our Brother HL-2270DW Laser Printer to join the network after we changed to the new router.

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