Hello,

I have the same problem. I have installed the 1600n and can print properly, but when I try to install the network scan I get the same error as you.  Also running XP Pro SP2.

Anybody has any ideas ?  Thanks.

 

TTT -- I am having the same problem. Discovered turning off the SP2 firewall by chance for installation. Now, adding the device in the Dell Network Scanning utility I cannot add a user. I get the described error above. "Unknown error. Please check your network connection."

SP2 Firewall is disabled, no other firewalls are present. The device replies to ping and I can print fine so the network connection is present. If anyone finds a solution on their own please post here because I am not having much luck with the phone support.

-Aaron

I might be getting somewhere with my phone call. I talked to a technical support rep. by the name of Brandy that took all the information I gave her and is forwarding it to engineering. I told her about this post and how it seems there are several of us with the issue and that the first post mentions it works ok on SP1. Well, I am going to find a spare PC here and load it up with an old SP1 disc and see what I can get. If it works, I will wipe it and try a clean install of SP2. If it still doesn't work she says engineering will look into fixing it for SP2. I find it hard to believe that they didn't do product testing for SP2, so it must be something we are overlooking.

-Aaron

Well, I must say that there appears to be a pattern here. Has anyone reading this had any success with XP SP2?

On a related note, I must say that I am pretty disappointed in Dell on this one ...

* Right off the bat when I encountered this problem, I connected to Dell support via live chat. After a couple of minutes a support person accepted the session. After about two minutes of exchanging pleasantries (i.e. verifying that I was entitled to bother him), the support person told me, "well, I only support ink jet printers, not laser printers. Please call our support line at 1-800-624-9896.

* So, I called that number. After sitting on hold for about 15 minutes, I got a support person on the line. Based on the noise that I heard on the phone line plus the accent of the person on the other end, I'm pretty sure that my call had been routed to a call center in India somewhere. After talking to this person for about 10 minutes, the response I got was ... "I'm sorry, this is a networking issue. Please call our fee-based support line at 866-497-2661 if you wish to pursue this issue."

* After that, I came to this forum where others are obviously having the same problem and again no one at Dell seems to care.

Bottom line -- I'm not paying these guys to debug an issue that is theirs ... it is *their* software that won't install on what I believe to be a fairly standard XP configuration. I would have thought that the folks at Dell would have worked through this by now and published a FAQ or something. I've looked and can't find anything. Dell may have stellar support on the PC front, but on the printer side there seems to be much left to be desired. Would I buy another Dell printer? Based on my experience so far, at this stage I would have to say "No."

On a side note, I bought this solely for the network scanning. We have printers all over the place here. The last thing I really needed was another toner cartridge to keep track of, but at $240 with the 40% off coupon last week it was cheaper than a stand alone HP scanner with ADF that we were looking at buying and connecting to a spare PC at an empty desk to create a 'scanning station'.

I NEED NETWORK SCANNING TO WORK!

-Aaron

I somehow got it to work. I don't know how I wish I could tell you. It sat at with the error message up for about 30 minutes worth of being on hold and going back and forth with the Dell rep. After the phone call I decided to try it one last time and it worked. I didn't do anything different at all. I did discover one thing though, after getting the device added with the firewall turned off I wanted to get it to work with the firewall (pushing my luck right?). So I loaded up Ethereal and did a packet capture to see what ports the printer connects to. Seems to be UDP/4177, so if you get it added just create an exception for this port on your subnet only.

-Aaron

No such luck for me ... I still have the firewall disabled. Even so, I have tried adding an explicit exception for the application itself and also explicitly added the UDP port you mention. Still nothing.

If you happen to remember what else you happened to twiddle, please post again.

Thanks!

The only other thing I did was remove and reinstall the File And Printer Sharing service but it did not work immediately after I did this. It continued to fail for a few tries. Even so I can't imagine how or why the software would use that API. I guess it couldn't hurt for you to try it anyway at this point.

-Aaron

Still no luck for me. It's probably something simple, but with no doc and a more or less useless error message, there's no telling.

Dell folks (who I hope are monitoring this forum) -- if you have any ideas, doc to share, etc., I would appreciate it. If you have descriptions of the process by which the "Add Device" stuff works with getting network scanning going on a box, I may be able to troubleshoot this myself. It's hard to troubleshoot something like this with no description of protocols, ports, process, etc. I'll return the favor by writing up a description of what the issue was and how I got around it so that you'll have an answer at hand for the next guy.

thanks!

Don't know if everyone has done this already or not, so hopefully this information will be helpful for some of you. In Dell's support site for the 1600N there is some patches with regards to the network scan feature.

http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/type.aspx?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd&SystemID=PRN_LSR_1600N&category=0&os=WNT5&osl=en&deviceid=6782&devlib=40

Hopefully this will fix some peoples problems. I have had one of these units come in to a client this week so I will probably be going through the same process this coming up week. I have my fingers crossed.