I’ve just bought an LP laser printer (a 179 MFP), having got fed up of paying far too much for inkjet ink. The printer arrived yesterday and today I set it up and plugged it in. At one point during the setup I needed to connect to the printer via a web browser and log in as the admin user. And that’s where the problems started 🙁
The manuals say that the default username is “admin” and there is no password, as to HP’s support pages. But that didn’t work, and neither did many of the other combinations that I guessed at. Eventually after much grubbing about in search engines I discovered that there may actually be a password after all.
What I needed to do was go to the printer and get the menu display (the three dots on the menu keypad) and then go through the submenus selecting “Network”, “Wifi”, “WPS” and finally “PIN”. That displayed a string of eight digits in two groups of four separated by a dash, and a countdown timer starting from two minutes.
Before the countdown timer reached zero (I assume), I had to log in via the browser again, using “admin” as a username and the eight digits (without the dash) as a password. That worked fine and I’ve now changed the admin password to something sane, but what a palaver!
I do understand the need to set unique passwords for control of embedded systems and fully support it, but you’d think that an organisation as large as HP would at least be able to keep their documentation up-to-date in that respect.