? Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary Linux, UNIX, FreeBSD, Windows, Mac OS - Hacks, Goodies, Tips and Tricks and The True Meaning of life http://www.pc-freak.net/blog Enable printing from Windows and Macs remotely through Linux Print server - Share Brother Printer DCP-1610W with Linux CUPS and Samba Windows Share Author : admin I've recently bought a new Printer model Brother DCP 1610W and as in my home I have already a small Linux router and a web server where this blog and a couple of other websites runs and I need multiple PC / notebook / mobile phone enabled people to print on the Printer easily pretty much like a Printing server for a Small Office environment. To do that of course I needed it configured to be accessible remotely for print via LAN and Wireless network. The task is not a complex one and printing remotely over the network is a standard thing many company organizations / universities and univerities does for quite some time and hence nowadays most printers are network connect ready so you just have to place them inside your home or corporate network and use the time to configure them via their web configuration interface or even some have their own embedded wifi adapter, as well as many printers nowdays can even be ready to print directly by just 1 / 17 ? Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary Linux, UNIX, FreeBSD, Windows, Mac OS - Hacks, Goodies, Tips and Tricks and The True Meaning of life http://www.pc-freak.net/blog connecting the Printer to the Wi-Fi network and installing its drivers on a Win host. Anyhow the most common way for both home printer configurations and corporate I'm aware of still is to Share the printer via Windows Server or Win Server Domain so anyone connected to the Network to be able to Add the printer via Winblows. In the case i'm going to describe below my home the Wi-Fi router is connected to an 5 Port Network Switch (HUB) which on its hand is connected to the Linux router which serves multiple things (a Linux router, a hosting server (web server and a database server hosted, a mail server, traffic proxy server, a firewall and a NAT router), I decided to Share the printer to Wi-Fi connected and LAN clients directly switched via an UTP cable to the switch by using the good old Linux Samba Sharing server. I did not actually do that for a really long time hence before I started I did some quick research to get an idea on the general steps to partake to succeed in Sharing the Printer over the network of this Debian's Wiki SystemPrinting Guide was mostly helpful. 1. Downloading and Installing necessery Brother Printer deb packages A small remark to make here is my Linux server is running Debian GNU / Linux and hence this article is giving details on how Printer can be Shared on Debian though a minor adaptation of the article should make it possible to install also on any RHEL / CentOS / SuSE etc. Redhat based RPM Linux distribution.) First step to do is to download Brother printer vendor provided drivers as of moment of writting this article they're here To download the drivers get the proper links and use wget or curl to download all the necessery .deb archives in lets say in /root/brother-printer-drivers e.g. before that create the folder with: root@linux:/root# mkdir /root/brother-printer-drivers Also it might be helpful for those who need some other Brother Printer Linux driver complete list of Brother Printer all Linux drivers as of time of writting this post is found on this URL here Next you need to install following Brother printer driver deb packages brscan-skey brscan4 2 / 17 ? Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary Linux, UNIX, FreeBSD, Windows, Mac OS - Hacks, Goodies, Tips and Tricks and The True Meaning of life http://www.pc-freak.net/blog dcp1610wcupswrapper dcp1610wlpr root@linux:/root# cd brother-printer-drivers root@linux:/root/brother-printer-drivers# dpkg -i --force-all brscan-skey-0.2.4-1.amd64.deb ... root@linux:/root# dpkg -i --force-all brscan4-0.4.4-1.amd64.deb ... root@linux:/root# dpkg -i --force-all dcp1610wcupswrapper-3.0.1-1.i386.deb ... root@linux:/root# dpkg -i --force-all dcp1610wlpr-3.0.1-1.i386.deb ... root@linux/root# cd ../ Once installed dpkg -l should show like so: root@linux:/root# dpkg -l |grep -i brother ii brscan-skey 0.2.4-1 Brother Linux scanner S-KEY tool ii brscan4 0.4.4-1 Brother Scanner Driver ii dcp1610wcupswrapper 3.0.1-1 Brother DCP-1610W CUPS wrapper driver ii dcp1610wlpr 3.0.1-1 Brother DCP-1610W LPR driver Brother's vendor provided packages will install drivers under /opt/brother root@linux:/root# ls -al /opt/brother/ ???? 16 drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 ??? 26 13:58 ./ drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 ??? 26 13:55 ../ drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 ??? 26 13:58 Printers/ drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 ??? 26 13:58 scanner/ 3 / 17 ? Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary Linux, UNIX, FreeBSD, Windows, Mac OS - Hacks, Goodies, Tips and Tricks and The True Meaning of life http://www.pc-freak.net/blog 2. Installing CUPS Printing Service and related Filters and Postscript packages necessery for PDF processing on CUPS server side root@linux:/root# apt-get install --yes cups cups-client cups-common cups-pdf cups-ppdc foomatic-db foomatic-db-engine foomatic-filters foomatic-filters-ppds openprinting-ppds lpr hp-ppd hpijs cups-pdf ghostscript-cups Your printing should work normally without cups-pdf and ghostscript-cups packages installed but I install them just in case if PDF processing is problematic you can skip that. It is also useful to install sane and sane-utils packages if you're going to use the brother's scanner capabilities. root@linux:/root# apt-get install --yes sane sane-utils Note that considering that all packages installed fine and the CUPS service is running, this should have set a proper printer into /etc/printcap a short database used to describe printers. printcap file is being used by UNIX's spooling system and allows you to dynamic addition and deletion of printers, for Linux / *Nix hosts which have more than one printer connected and added in CUPs records for the various printer goes there. With a single Brother DCP-1610W Printer like my case is you should have records similar to these: root@linux:~/brother-printer-drivers# cat /etc/printcap DCP1610W:\ :mx=0:\ :sd=/var/spool/lpd/DCP1610W:\ :sh:\ :lp=/dev/usb/lp0:\ 4 / 17 ? Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary Linux, UNIX, FreeBSD, Windows, Mac OS - Hacks, Goodies, Tips and Tricks and The True Meaning of life http://www.pc-freak.net/blog :if=/opt/brother/Printers/DCP1610W/lpd/filter_DCP1610W: 3. Adding a Printer in CUPS the easy way through CUPS Printing System Web Interface CUPS has a nice web interface for setting up and administering printers and print queues. Below is a selfexplanatory screenshot of Add Printer screen . Use your favourite browser (Firefox, Opera, Chromium, lynx, elinks - yes the great news is console / terminal browsers are also supported well by cups web iface) to display interface and add a printer via the Administration screen. If you are asked for a username and password see here. 5 / 17 ? Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary Linux, UNIX, FreeBSD, Windows, Mac OS - Hacks, Goodies, Tips and Tricks and The True Meaning of life http://www.pc-freak.net/blog There are three sections. The first is for local printers; that is, printers which are usually attached to the machine you are using. These are very often printers using a USB connection but can be parallel or serial port printers. Adding a USB printer is a common occurance and one should automatically be detected as a local printer and a URI (Unified Resource Indicator) for its connection displayed on the next page. The Other Network Printers section requires you to specify the destination for the remote print queue/printer, which could be on the local network or many kilometres away. AppSocket is almost always available on a network printer and other devices and requires only the IP address of the printer and a port number. An Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) URI is the preferrred choice for connecting to another CUPS server because it is CUPS' native protocol. ipp14 is the ipp backend from CUPS 1.4 and Debian- specific. It is provided because some devices do not work with the current ipp backend, which has a stricter adherence to the IPP standard. A Line Printer Daemon (LPD) URI could be considered if the remote printing service does not support IPP satisfactorily or at all. As before, when a remote print queue is doing the filtering choose RAW as the Make/Manufacturer. 4. Printer Status and Control testing whether CUPS printing is up and running 6 / 17 ? Walking in Light with Christ - Faith, Computing, Diary Linux, UNIX, FreeBSD, Windows, Mac OS - Hacks, Goodies, Tips and Tricks and The True Meaning of life http://www.pc-freak.net/blog Once cups is installed and hopefully up and running you should see the cups process up and running to check it do: root@linux:/root# /etc/init.d/cups status; ps axuwwf|grep -i cups|grep -v grep Status of Common Unix Printing System: cupsd is running.