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  • I have both a brother printer and a hp printer. My brother printer was connected with my system previously, so I decided to connect my hp printer with my router. At the time of connecting, it wanted a WPS pin on hp printer. I somehow found that pin from https://errorcode0x.com/wps-pin-on-hp-printer/ and connected it. But then my brother printer is not working anymore. What should I do now?

  • By Howard - edited: November 26, 2019

    I suggest you re-Pin the brother printer, using the WPS controls built into the printer.   Hopefully the Brother supports the same WPS capabilities as the HP.  

    This may require you to actually "remove" the SSID name from the Brother printer first.     Hopefully you won't have to "reset to factory settings" on the printer if you have any special settings on it.

    You may have noticed that with some supplicants on other devices, e.g. PC's, you can't CHANGE  a network password after you've changed the AP's paswword, without first deleting the SSID on the device first.   I believe this is a similar problem.

    If that is not possible, then you may have to use a non-WPS method on the HP printer, and you may have to get into the nitty-gritty HP controls to do that.    Most Enterprise networks do not support WPS, so hopefully buried somewhere within its controls it is possible. 

    I've had similar problems at home, with multiple printer types.

    Good luck.  Please report your progress.

    Howard

  • By Howard - edited: January 16, 2021

    Just as an addendum, I wanted to comment on the lack of WPS in Commercial printers.

    Within a year of WPS being publicly announced, several companies including Zebra considered adding WPS to its products.  This was especially attractive as most chip manufacturers were starting to build it into their chip sets.

    When reading the original specifications for WPS, it seemed to have several security holes in it, but it actuality it had many weaknesses.   A hacking program called Reaver, quickly found one of them, using an intelligent brute-force method.   

    WFA came up with a simplistic temporary block to Reaver, and even obscured the fact that changes had been made to the WPS protocol frame making Reaver, using its original algorithm, useless.

    Then, and worst of all, some manufacturer broke the basic rules written into the specification, by pre-loading their default pin numbers keyed DIRECTLY off the MAC address of the 802.11 radio.   (that was obviously stupid even if it hadn't been forbidden in the standard)

    After suffering much egg on their face, WFA secretly redefined the specification again, tightened the protocol and increased the WPS Certification process.   Lazy or ignorant manufactures still botched things, requiring the WFA to again strengthen the WPS protocol with additional timeout traps.   Finally , an updated WPS was released under a kind of fog, as I recall.

    By that point, big companies were rightfully gun-shy and pretty much wouldn't buy printers containing  WPS.   

    If a feature scares away customers, you can bet no smart company is going to build it into their products.

    WPS is a million times safer than it used to be, but to this day I never leave it enabled on my  home AP for longer than the few minutes it takes to use it.

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