GregLedet.net Adventures in networking, security, and other things

Problems with your D-Link DP-300U?

If you're like me, you have a ton of computer crap laying around your house.  Today I found an old D-Link DP-300U print server laying around and thought that I could put it to good use.  The bad thing about these things is the fact that they do not have a hardware reset button on them, so if you forget the IP or the Password, you're pretty much hosed... or so I thought.  After doing some google searches for how to find a lost IP, I came back empty.  The PS Admin program that D-Link publishes for use with this thing couldn't find it on my network either.  After some thinking, I came up with an idea.

If you know anything about networking and how networks work, you should have thought about this too.  Get a Wireshark capture running.  Unplug the power from the print server and then replug it.  It's going to send out an ARP on the network looking for it's gateway which should be picked up by Wireshark.  It should look like this:

In my case, it came back as 192.168.1.253.  After changing the IP on my laptop to fit that subnet, I was able to log into it via it's web interface (there was no password on it thank God!) and put it back to factory settings. Voila!  What once was a brick is now a working print server!

-Greg