Sharing A Printer Over Your Network

I recently wrote about setting up a basic home network. Read here: How To Set Up A Home Network

If you got your network set up and working, you might want to add your printer to the network. First, you have to make sure your printer is shared. Go to the search bar and type Printers and scanners. Click on it when it appears on the menu list. Do this on the computer with the direct printer connection. Click on your printer as listed and click on Manage in the drop-down menu.

Then click on Printer properties. In the window that opens, click on the Sharing tab and select Share this printer. I also have Render print jobs on client computers checked. Then click on OK.

Now, go to another computer on your network and type Printers and scanners in the search, and click on it in the menu. You should then see the Add a printer or scanner option next to a square with a plus sign. Click on it. Wait a bit to see if it can pick it up. Also, make sure your printer is powered on at this point.

My printer is hooked up to my Asus directly, and I’m going to start by connecting up my Gateway desktop. On my Gateway, I clicked on the add printer option. It couldn’t find it. I got the message, The printer that I want isn’t listed. So I clicked on that line.

This opened up a box with different options to install your printer. I chose the Select a shared printer by name. Couldn’t find my printer with the browse button so I started typing in the IP address of my printer, my IP address for my Asus, in my case: \\192.168.0.4\. When I got to this point the auto-complete option dropped down with the full printer path, so I clicked on it: \\192.168.0.4\Canon MX490 series Printer, then Next.

It started looking for and installing the drivers. When finished, I clicked on next.

Then I got a You’ve successfully added Canon MX490 series Printer on 192.168.0.4 message. With the option to print a test page, which I did. And it worked. I clicked on Finish.

So now, I have to try to hook up one of my laptops and try this with the wireless. I went with the Acer Aspire 5315.  It’s slow but it works.

So I ran the same procedures, going to printer and scanners, clicking on add printer, adding the IP address manually, but it came up with a unique error. Windows couldn’t connect to the printer. Operation failed with error 0x0000011b.

An online search suggested it was caused by a Microsoft update. I could try to hunt down the update and uninstall it but decided to just add the registry tweak.

Run this solution on all PCs in your network. I didn’t do this on my Gateway, if it ain’t broke… Open the registry editor by typing regedit in the search, and click on it in the menu. Proceed with caution, as always.

Navigate in the Registry to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print, right-click on the right-hand side of the editor and click on New, DWORD (32-bit) Value and type RpcAuthnLevelPrivacyEnabled. Its default value is 0 so leave it at that. Restart your system.

Otherwise, create a text file with the following:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print]
“RpcAuthnLevelPrivacyEnabled”=dword:00000000

Save it with a reg extension. Then double-click to add it to the registry. Accept all prompts. Restart system.

I did this on both my Asus and my Acer laptop. Now when I tried to access the printer on my laptop it didn’t give that error message anymore but it did complain about not being able to find the drivers. Luckily, I had the CD that came with the printer and installed the drivers with no problem. And my laptop can now see my printer and it works. I successfully printed up the test page.

Now, two more laptops and one more desktop to go. Repeat these procedures for all computers that you want to be able to access your printer.

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