A story of a request for a SMTP exception

We have a new printer/copier in our office. It’s a SHARP MX-M283N. It’s very nice. It has a scan-to-email function, which is not set up. I called the printer/copier company to find out how we get this feature set up and our printer/copier representative said that we needed to put in a ticket with CSSD and request and SMTP exception.

SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and we need an exception made in the firewall so that we can email our scans from the copier. Right now the port is a one-way street with information (print jobs) going in and once the exception is made it will be a two-way street with the ability to emails to go out.

In order to complete this request CSSD needed the IP address of the printer/copier and the number of the port. We ran into a problem here because we are a Pitt entity in a UPMC building with Pitt-owned ports. None of the ports are labeled. Therefore, we needed to find the MAC address or Media Access Control address, which also can be called the hardware address or the physical address. You can find the physical address of your computer (if it is running Windows) if you go into the Command Prompt and type “ipconfig /all” and hit return. However, finding the physical address of a printer/copier is a little bit trickier.

The user has to login to the printer/copier as an administrator, follow a chain of menus via the touch screen, and then print a test page, which is actually a configuration report—the MAC address is listed in that report.

Can we scan-to-email now? No, but we should be able to do this when we come into work on Monday 6/28 after the upcoming Change Management period according to CSSD.