Brother laser printer/scanner on Ethernet

[Juan R. de Silva]

On Wed, 11 Nov 2020 17:31:23 +0000, David Fletcher wrote:

> 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

I'm using Brother AIO of different model currently and I've used 2 other 
models in last several years. Brother drivers are very good and all do 
the same route. The installer creates in /opt 'brother' folder tree. /opt/
brother/scanner/brscan4/brsanenetdevice4.cfg file will contain IP address 
of the scanner, which you are to supply during installation. Xsane picks 
it up from there. Everything works dandy, no miracles involved. :-)