Two Faced?

Screenshots of two GUIs with the same IP address

Today’s post is a little fix that most experienced IT professionals could figure out quickly, but I share it for those who might have some knowledge but are puzzled by some odd behavior. I was helping a non-profit organization set up a copier that a copier technician installed with the help of the IT service contracted by the non-profit.

Simply put, print jobs to the copier were not working shortly after the techs left. To further complicate matters, the web GUI for the copier was only loading half the time. Ricoh made the copier, but a web GUI for an Aruba unit was coming up sometimes. It took some time to sort out that the Aruba unit was not part of the copier using a different port but rather a VOIP phone. Once that was determined, it became clear that two different devices were using the same IP address.

The IP address manually assigned to the copier matched the IP address distributed via DHCP to the VOIP phone. Looking at the error logs in the Meraki switch confirmed this behavior. However, if one did not have access to the switch, unplugging the network cable to the copier and seeing that the IP address was still pinging back would show that another device on the network had the same IP address. The IP conflict could have been prevented by pinging the fixed IP address before it was manually assigned to the copier.

Once the copier IP address changed, everything worked again. Then I made a request to IT for the Meraki switch to give the MAC address of the copier a fixed IP address outside of the DHCP pool. I ensured that the IP address was not currently assigned as a fixed IP address and that nothing on the network pinged back with the new IP address before the fixed assignment was made. Now the copier can be set back to DHCP and receive the fixed IP assignment from the Meraki DHCP server. This way, if the copier is ever moved to a different VLAN, it will get a new IP address without needing to touch the settings on the copier.

I am unsure why the Meraki switch did not try to assign the VOIP unit a new IP address once it saw a conflict. Maybe the VOIP unit had a fixed IP address for some reason. I did not look into it further.

Have you ever had two devices with the same IP address on the same network? How did you find out? Comment below.

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