The Domesticated Primate

Quite some time ago, I bought a Brother 5250DN, and proceeded to screw up the network port almost immediately. Not intentionally, mind you. :) I was putting the jack in backwards, thinking it was correct - okay, the room didn't have all the lights it should have had on. So a routine install turned into quite a frustrating time, since it was no longer finding the printer on the network. So I just bailed, and instead slaved the printer off Tiffany's Windoze machine using the USB jack and was able to print from all relevant machines, but had the irritation of every time I printed, knowing that it was a less than ideal set-up, especially given that I bought it specifically because it had duplex printing and networking built-in.

Recently, Tiffany moved her computer to another room, so I decided to revisit the whole printer mess - this time, I was hell-bent on getting it to work if at all possible. Finally, at wit's end and after making sure it wasn't a router port or a cable, I decided to take a very small screwdriver and try to move the pins that had been pushed down before when I put the jack in backwards. I very gently tried to pull the pins toward me and then re-inserted jack, and then used Brother software that does the scan, and holy cow, it worked! Now I just wonder how delicate that connection is, but for now it's working without being slaved...