Re: 'PUB'lic Printer
I stayed with friends a while ago who lived in a village in a house next door to a gastropub. Had a very nice lunch there, introduced to the landlord and the odd complimentary bottle of red made things even better. Later that afternoon Mrs X as I'll call her is having problems printing. She's sent the document several times but nothing is reaching the printer. It's a wireless one and I'm asked if I'll take a look because the laptop she's printing from is brand new and this is a first time print from it. She says her stuff isn't coming - out the printer just appears to be doing nothing no matter what she tries.
After looking at her printer I can't initially spot the problem, it's connected to the wifi fine. Then I realised she's not sending things to her printer. The unsecured wifi that her laptop is connected to belongs to the gastropub. She's added that printer instead of her own and the pub must have the same model by the looks of it. A quick visit to the pub and they have two and a bit copies (paper ran out) of her 80 page thesis and they're mystified as to how she's been able to print on their machine. After pointing out that the wifi in the office is unsecured there's a very red face on the landlord. His security idea was 'interesting' in that he'd bought a wifi router just for the printer to connect to the ageing computer they used for just for printing the menu etc. After a few problems connecting to the router wirelessly he'd come up with a brilliant solution. He'd checked on his phone that the signal couldn't be picked up in the public areas of the pub through the thick stone walls & metal kitchen but not if it reached anywhere else. Happy with that he'd decided it was sufficient security and had disabled the wifi encryption to make things 'easier' and less likely not to connect. I suggested enabling the encryption and using an ethernet cable to connect to the router.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
