Brother laser printer/scanner on Ethernet

[Gene Heskett]

On Wednesday 11 November 2020 12:31:23 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

The one small gotcha I noticed when running my MFP-J6920DW (an ink 
squirter that's slower than her laser but it does up to tabloid on the 
paper or the glass with an ADF for reasonable sized stuff) on ethernet 
was the Brother supplied driver sent a bad tcp checksum the first 6 
times it tried to wake it up, after that it Just Worked, but not as fast 
by a noticeable margin as when it was being addressed over the usb 
cable. So I've been using it on usb since. If she doesn't mind the 7 
seconds ethernet takes to send a proper tcp checksum to wake it up, it 
should then work, both for cups and for xsane. The checksum error was 
found by wireshark.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
 - Louis D. Brandeis
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>