Brother laser printer/scanner on Ethernet

[Peter Flynn]

On 11/11/2020 17:31, 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. 

XSane found mine (HP) immediately and has given no problems.

> 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.

Good call.

> 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 had to do a lot of fiddling to get my mother's Brother multifunction 
scanner/printer to work with my laptop (and her desktop) when I visited 
last year, but it did eventually work. There are Brother downloads 
called brscan4 and brscan-skey (debs) which you need, which provide a 
command brsaneconfig4 which makes it all work.

> Will the scanner be accessed by telling sane to go to an IP address or
> will there be some other cleverness going on?

Basically, yes. You do need to know how to find out what IP address the 
DHCP server has assigned to the device.

The commands I used were:

$ sudo dpkg -i --force-all brscan4-0.4.2-1.amd64.deb 
brscan-skey-0.2.4-1.amd64.deb
$ nmap -sT 192.168.1.0/24 | awk '/report/ {ip=$6} /printer/ {print $1,ip}'
(change that IP address to match your network)
$ brsaneconfig4 -a name=Brother model=<model number> ip=<result of nmap>
$ brsaneconfig4 -q | grep Brother

Peter