periodic network down/up with printer

[voix des airs]

Greetings,

I recently installed a new HP Color LaserJet 2605dn network printer. It configures with BOOTP and works fine with CUPS. I can talk to the printer's web-browser-based configuration interface without trouble.

One thing is happening, however, that I don't understand: the network interface (eht1 in my case) that the printer is connected to keeps going down for about 2 seconds and then back up again. This (mostly) happens exactly one minute after the printer emits some sort of netBIOS/SMB UDP packet (I guess it's advertising it's presence on the network, but I don't know anything about SMB). It does this every 12 minutes. However, I have seen the eth1 down/up behavior without the SMB packet proceeding it - mostly, I think, after the printer has been communicated with.

Is this normal? If so what's happening? Is it the printer or the computer doing it? If it's not normal, could someone maybe provide me with some idea of where to start looking? If it helps, my system log file is full of entries like this:

Sep 30 15:33:40 localhost kernel: eth1: link down
Sep 30 15:33:42 localhost kernel: eth1: link up, 100Mbps, full-duplex, lpa 0x41E1

There are no other entries related to this. I am not running samba and there are no Windows machines on the network.

Thanks!

P.S. If this isn't a networking question, then I apologize - but it seemed more network related than printing related to me.

[Lazydog]

Sep 30 15:33:40 localhost kernel: eth1: link down
Sep 30 15:33:42 localhost kernel: eth1: link up, 100Mbps, full-duplex, lpa 0x41E1

This is the printer shutting down the network port and then bringing it back on-line. This is happening because of the setting for your DHCP server lease time. You want this to stop you have 2 choices.

1. Increase your Lease Time on the DHCP Server

2. Configure a static IP address on the printer.

I understand that everyone think DHCP is the best way to go and easy, but that was not the idea behind it. DHCP is for devices that would be moving a lot, like a laptop, so you don't have to re-configure it every time you changed your location. A stationary device should be hard coded with an IP Address. You wouldn't configure your servers with DHCP would you?

[voix des airs]

Thanks, I will look into this. I guess I understand even less about DHCP/BOOTP than I thought... I thought that since I had the printer address fixed in dhcpd.conf, like this:

host ColorLaserJet {
hardware ethernet [address deleted];
fixed-address 192.168.0.254;
}

that it would not be renewing at all - or at the least not more than every six hours as that is what the default-lease-time is set to... does the default-lease-time not apply to BOOTP or fixed addresses or something? Or do I have it in the wrong place? (I'm also not seeing any DHCP traffic with ehterial on eth1 after it comes back up).

Thanks again. This is not a critical issue as the printer works fine, I'm just trying to understand what is happening a little better.

[Lazydog]

No that just reserves that ip address for that MAC address. It just ensures that the same ip address is assigned.