Brother laser printer/scanner on Ethernet

[David Fletcher]

Hi folks,

My situation:-
A friend wants to buy a new colour printer/scanner. I've been using a
Brother HL-3040CN for several years that I use on Ethernet via CUPS on
my server which works perfectly but using the scanner on a
multifunction device on Ethernet is outside my experience. I do have an
Epson Perfection 2450 Photo that's plugged into my server for use over
the network. I just have to configure sane on the desk/laptop to talk
to sane on the server instead of a local device on USB.

I'm recommending Ethernet connection because she will want to use the
device with both Windows and Linux computers, plus the web server on
the printer gives all the information for cartridge status etc.

My question:-
The Brother model she is looking at is the DCP-L3550CDW. Unfortunately
it is out of stock everywhere at the moment hopefully because everybody
is home working. How should I expect the standard xsane, gscan2pdf etc,
scanner software to be used with such a device? I'm looking at the
Brother web site that says it has a driver installer that includes both
the CUPS and scanner drivers. It's probably the same clever script that
I found to get my laser working again with a new 64 bit server board.
Will the scanner be accessed by telling sane to go to an IP address or
will there be some other cleverness going on?

I've ended up being the locally available computer consultant friend,
so, thanks to anybody who can give me any enlightenment on this.

Dave