Comment by GhettoComputers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GhettoComputers | Hacker News Reader

GhettoComputers

Who is this for? It’s just for enabling CUPS?

I don’t get the point of this in 2021, unless you have a very insecure router that isn’t updated or supports basic features you can just connect your printer (even my $99 brother laser the HL-2170W over a decade ago had WiFi and CUPS support) via Ethernet and print with it even if your printer doesn’t support it. That’s been the case with my Tomato firmware compatible routers for over a decade, plus there’s an obsession over PiHole despite the charts not working for anyone using HTTPS, which is essentially just using a weak embedded device to reimplement router functions you probably could have configured.

Using everything but the lowest end router you’ll probably have DDWRT (which is offered by default by linksys), Tomato, Merlin (Asus offered default) or OpenWRT (tons of default firmware is based on it) that can do everything and more on your existing hardware like CLI control, CUPS, OpenVPN, DNS, ad blocking (I use a script to update my hosts, I disabled logging since HTTPS masks it), QoS, SAMBA file sharing, signal boosting, and random security features.

I don’t really want to couple my printer to my router, and I’d rather airgap my printer from the network (for security, user hostile firmware ‘updates’, and general spyware because I don’t trust printer manufacturers).

I agree a Pi hole would be better suited towards a computer, if I had a server I would use cups on that, but I wouldn’t discourage people from playing with pis unless more reliable enterprise-ie type concepts were a key goal.

What manufacturer? You can do it via USB and have a script disable mounting or mount on command if you'd like, but if you have a Pi it won't be any different if you use the same network. Still the RT68U I suggested is only $40 if you want to have a secondary network, and you probably have a router laying around that supports custom firmware.

I think if you have a Pi the best thing you can use it to prototype if you want dedicated hardware for what the pi is doing, but if you are buying it for the purpose of OP, its not a good use of resources, and anything a Pi can do an old laptop or desktop can do it better and prototype it with no cost and probably better software, but if power usage is an issue dedicated hardware should be considered.

I think a networked printer like your Brother will show up on your Mac but not on your iOS devices.

Getting your printer to show on your iOS devices is what I thought this article was about.

Airprint from the iphone does not work with my brother printer. Does the pi trick works to fix it?

Yes.

I’m using an Ubuntu VM as a CUPS/smb print server to print to my 2006 HP3600n; I just tried it from my iPhone - worked fine. I see no reason to think it wouldn’t from a Pi.

(I wasn’t even trying to get AirPrint to work; it just worked out of the box and today’s the first day I ever tried it.)

It might be your router blocking wifi-to-wifi lan connectivity, check your settings. My Brother wifi label printer works great with airprint from my iPhone.

I usually have mine off and never actually printed from my iPhone, but if it’s just CUPS as a standard I don’t see why not. Theres tons of old tutorials for getting it running with a router. http://tomatousb.org/forum/t-573238/airprint-google-cloud-pr... so to me it’s a solved issue.

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