brother printer added but not printing

[Taigo]

So at the company i intern at i tried using the printer so i installed the drivers for it using the RPM method and it seems to be installed correctly. CUPS reconises the printer in the network, adds it to my printers, and it should work. But when i try printing anything it just instantly get's marked as completed and the printer does absolutely nothing.

The model of the printer is MFC-J5730DW and the brand is from Brother.

This is the output of lpinfo -m | grep brother

Code: Select all

taigo@localhost ~> lpinfo -m | grep brother
Brother/brother_mfcj5730dw_printer_en.ppd Brother MFC-J5730DW CUPS
lsb/usr/Brother/brother_mfcj5730dw_printer_en.ppd Brother MFC-J5730DW CUPS

[/i]

yes i did check the ink...

[charles17]

See viewtopic-t-1116386-start-0.html

[Taigo]

See viewtopic-t-1116386-start-0.html

I would have tried that if knew the IP address of the printer but it seems like not even by boss knows.
Can i not find the IP using the drivers since it makes printers discoverable in your network?

[rab0171610]

How is CUPS installed? If it is only net-print/cups, try using net-print/cups-meta instead.

I had a similar problem at one point. My printer worked fine until some changes in CUPS:
https://wwwtest.gentoo.org/support/news ... lters.html

I did a depclean after an update and net-print/cups-filters was removed. The Brother printer no longer printed but jobs appeared to be sent to the printer.
It may not apply to you but I thought it worth mentioning.

As well there is a an ebuild in the brother-overlay, net-print/brother-mfcj5730dw-bin .
It was from 2022 so dependency is still only net-print/cups. You may currently need net-print/cups-meta (net-print/cups, net-print/libppd, net-print/libcupsfilters, & net-print/cups-filters).

[Taigo]

How is CUPS installed? If it is only net-print/cups, try using net-print/cups-meta instead.

I had a similar problem at one point. My printer worked fine until some changes in CUPS:
https://wwwtest.gentoo.org/support/news ... lters.html

I did a depclean after an update and net-print/cups-filters was removed. The Brother printer no longer printed but jobs appeared to be sent to the printer.
It may not apply to you but I thought it worth mentioning.

As well there is a an ebuild in the brother-overlay, net-print/brother-mfcj5730dw-bin .
It was from 2022 so dependency is still only net-print/cups. You may currently need net-print/cups-meta (net-print/cups, net-print/libppd, net-print/libcupsfilters, & net-print/cups-filters).

I have installed both cups and cups-meta and this happened. But i got the drivers from the official website by installing it's RPM.
I'm really willing to just use the IPP method but I would need the printer's IP address.

[rab0171610]

I guess you are confident you followed all of the instructions correctly and did not miss anything (including creating the missing directories, etc):
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Brother_ne ... stallation

Did you try going to the cups interface:
http://localhost:631/admin

Click on the Printers tab and see if the IP address is listed.
You may need to connect the printer to the computer via USB.

[Taigo]

I guess you are confident you followed all of the instructions correctly and did not miss anything (including creating the missing directories, etc):
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Brother_ne ... stallation

Did you try going to the cups interface:
http://localhost:631/admin

Click on the Printers tab and see if the IP address is listed.
You may need to connect the printer to the computer via USB.

On the interface it says lpd://BRN3C2AF4A210ED/BINARY_P1
Not much of use there. I expected an IP.
I'll try USB as last resort, i really expected it to work since after installing drivers and all that it automatically added my printer. But it does not show up in the discoverable printers.

[lars_the_bear]

On the interface it says lpd://BRN3C2AF4A210ED/BINARY_P1
Not much of use there. I expected an IP.

Yeah -- me too. That's a Bonjour or AirPrint address, I think. To use that, CUPS needs to find ippfind, which depends on avahi, neither of which I've installed. Frankly, I've found this addressing method to be flaky even with other Linux systems. So I've fixed the IP number of my printer.

Even if you can find the IP number of the printer, it could change again, unless you fixed it. If you can't fix it, I guess ippfind has to be made to work. Since I don't use it, I've no idea how to do that.

Incidentally, the problem you describe -- where a job seems to be created and disappear immediately -- I had that problem myself at first. For reasons I really don't understand, rebooting seemed to fix it :/

BR, Lars.

[rab0171610]

BINARY_P1
That is just the default name of the Brother remote printer queue, (Print server binary). If you do not have control of the router in the work area, you do not know if the printer is actually getting assigned an IP address. If you are in an area where the network is completely open with no IP allocation or MAC filtering , which is unlikely in a work environment, then the printer possibly could be connecting to the network unimpeded.
The only way that CUPS web interface could show you the IP address, if the printer is indeed assigned one, would be to connect the printer to the USB cable. Then, if the printer has an IP address it could report that. There is no way for CUPS to know the IP address at this point if there is not a physical or network connection to the printer for the printer to report such information to CUPS.
So you either need access to the router that is assigning IP addresses to set it up or you need a connection to the printer physically until such time as you can access it remotely through the IP. At that point you can set up Driverless printing using the IP.

[lars_the_bear]

If you do not have control of the router in the work area, you do not know if the printer is actually getting assigned an IP address.

I would have thought that if CUPS (or its supporting bits and pieces) reported that there was a printer at "BRN3C2AF4A210ED", then the printer probably has an IP number. I'm not sure the printer would be able to respond to the multicast without an IP number. Admittedly, that isn't guaranteed, and I'm no networking expert.

On my Fedora system I can find the printer's IP by doing:

Code: Select all

$ ippfind -ls
ipp://BRN3C2AF4059F79.local:631/ipp/print idle accepting-jobs none
Brother HL-3150CDW series
...

$ ping BRN3C2AF4059F79.local
PING BRN3C2AF4059F79.local (192.168.1.120) 56(84) bytes of data.

But there's a whole stack of infrastructure which makes that possible (which I haven't installed on Gentoo). Alternatively, I can just press the 'test page' button on the printer, and it prints the IP along with the other stuff.

In the end, I just fixed the IP number. It seemed like less hassle.

BR, Lars.

[rab0171610]

I would have thought that if CUPS (or its supporting bits and pieces) reported that there was a printer at "BRN3C2AF4A210ED", then the printer probably has an IP number. I'm not sure the printer would be able to respond to the multicast without an IP number.

You are likely correct on that.

[Taigo]

On the interface it says lpd://BRN3C2AF4A210ED/BINARY_P1
Not much of use there. I expected an IP.

Yeah -- me too. That's a Bonjour or AirPrint address, I think. To use that, CUPS needs to find ippfind, which depends on avahi, neither of which I've installed. Frankly, I've found this addressing method to be flaky even with other Linux systems. So I've fixed the IP number of my printer.

Even if you can find the IP number of the printer, it could change again, unless you fixed it. If you can't fix it, I guess ippfind has to be made to work. Since I don't use it, I've no idea how to do that.

Incidentally, the problem you describe -- where a job seems to be created and disappear immediately -- I had that problem myself at first. For reasons I really don't understand, rebooting seemed to fix it :/

BR, Lars.

Rebooting.. i don't even remember trying that. I'll give it another shot tommorow at work. but the IP of the printer should be fixed for a reason that is quite funny which is that the DHCP on the router does funny sometimes so we all have a fixed IP.