Comment by chrisseaton
10 years ago
> Download the installation script from Brother, run it, it asks me for the hostname of my printer and I'm up and running.
But this is already sounding archaic and difficult isn't it? Just download and run an installation script? Give it the host name? No way a nontechnical user is going to be able to do either of those things.
Why doesn't the printer just appear like it does on my Mac? I'm not even sure what my printer's host name is so I wouldn't even be able to do that step myself!
However worse that installation may be on Linux compared to your Mac, it pales in comparison to the atrocious Windows experience.
"Download this .ZIP file from the Brother website. Then unpack it somewhere. Go through these dialog boxes from the Devices and Printers control panel. Be sure to uncheck such and such before clicking next in such and such. Then at this point, choose "Have Disk" and browse for where you unzipped the drivers and find the ".inf" file in there somewhere."
If the printer is on a dynamically assigned IP address, chances are that the port created for it will use a hard-coded entry like "192.168.1.13" which will break. The DHCP host name requested by the printer can be used, but you will have to manually enter that. It is some awful serial number: a mixture of random digits and letters. It's better to navigate to the printer's web firmware first, and rename it to some human-readable name, then edit the printer port to match.
> If the printer is on a dynamically assigned IP address, chances are that the port created for it will use a hard-coded entry like "192.168.1.13" which will break. The DHCP host name requested by the printer can be used [...]
Personally, I've never understood this. Are there a lot of admins who let their printers take IPs from the DHCP pool?
> Are there a lot of admins who let their printers take IPs from the DHCP pool?
You mean just about every single home network?
Although, in an enterprise setting, if you count DHCP reservations then that's what we do, having our whole office use them has greatly simplified our network configuration.
I could imagine a world where printers had a built-in DDNS client which would make them truly plug-and-play in an office but that's probably more complicated than it's worth.
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I learned years ago to always assign IP addresses to printers via DHCP but to set up reservations for them so that the IP doesn't change. Of course, this was at the time that configuring an IP address manually on a printer involved a two-line LCD screen (if you were lucky) and clicking buttons on the front to increment each octet of the IP address by one each time you clicked.
Re-addressing a couple hundred printers was not fun when each of them was configured manually via the front panel.
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There are a lot of people who install a printer despite not having access to the router.
Exactly. On my Linux systems, it's just like your Mac (and considering that CUPS is owned by Apple and used on Macs just like on Linux, this makes sense): you just let the printer appear when it searches the local network, and select one of the already-loaded drivers. Why would you need to download some "installation script" from the manufacturer? How ridiculous.