I know computers better than just about anyone who hasn't studied them for school or works on them for a living. I admin my own remote servers. I comile my own linux distros and run local servers and use them to stream and backup and blah blah blah...I guess what I am driving at is that I know a thing or two about how these things work. I have encountered an issue that i have never seen nor even THOUGHT of before...here goes:

The other day our printer stopped working. It's a fairly new Brother (black only uses toner...fabulous printer...) and was working like a charm until the sudden stoppage. Nothing can connect to it. I tried all the things to get it to run...no luck. It's running on the network so that all devices can (...could...) see it. So, after days of working on this enigma somethime bizzare happens. I'm on my computer (the same one I am typing this on) and decide to connect to my VPN on a headless unit I'm running in france (mind you this isn't SSH...this is just using openVPN. I connect via SSH all the time...). Anyways...I connect...and about 15 seconds later my printer starts to print off everything in the printer queue for the first time in days. I say to myself..."huh...that's weird...". I do my thing...then disconnect from the VPN....and 15 seconds letter get the error stating that my printer has gone offline.

Serious perplexitude....my brain starts turning...and I decided that MAYBE...connecting to the VPN did that? What?

So I fire up the VPN, connect again...and 15 seconds later my printer works again. Litterally, the first time in my memory that my mouth actually just sits there open while my brain tries to process what is going on...

Anyways I have googled this...I have binged it (just kidding, who uses bing lol)....serisouly though I have no answer as to why on earth my computer can only connect to my printer when a VPN (TO FREAKING FRANCE...no location is probbaly irrelevant frankly...) is on...

I'm happy to create logs or whatver you smart people can think of. There's probably more information that I'm missing...actually I know of one possibly key piece of info...anyways...if anyone has any help or ideas let me know because it's a weird one.