Almost, but not quite, complete network failure on a Brother HL-L3290CDW.

[mwg42]

I have an aggravating problem with my Brother HL-L3290CDW.

I am using the printer on Linux, and things changed. One day, everything was working. Print, scan, etc.

The next day. Almost all network related functionality had vanished.

The printer can get an address via DHCP. The printer web page doesn’t work.

Print utilities can discover the printer, but cannot print.

I connected the unit to USB. The scanner interface is visible, no additional printer interface is visible.

All scanner programs I have tested so far but one can see the scanner, but cannot scan. They just do nothing. No scan, no error.

Xsane produces the following error after the printer actualy seems to scan. About 3 minutes later; this pops up:

Failed to open device ‘Brother4:bus4;dev11’
Error during device I/O

When scanning on USB, Xsane says this immediately:

Error during read. Error during device I/O

The only network related feature that I can make work is printing, and that only by manually setting up LPR/LPD printing.

Does anyone have any ideas as to what might be happening here?

 

[marywilliams01]

It sounds like the printer’s network service might have glitched. I’d try doing a network reset on the printer and reconnecting it to your Wi-Fi. Also reinstall or refresh the Brother Linux drivers/SANE backend, because updates sometimes break scanner communication. I had a similar issue once and a quick network reset plus driver reinstall fixed it.

 

[mwg42]

I didn't know about the network reset. I did that. No change in behavior. I'll look into re-install of drivers and such, but I don't think that will help. The reason for this is I'm running half a dozen operating systems in virtual machines, and all of them get the same results. Six different browsers are unable to get to the printer web page. The systems that are new enough to scan for printers can see it, but not print by default. If I manually configure lpr/lpd printing, I can print.

At this point, I think anything other than printing is toast.

The printer is just over four years old.

If anyone has ideas of other things I can try, let me know.

I'm going to see about reinstalling things on my system, but I don't hold out much hope on that front.

Thanks for the help.

 

[mwg42]

I've been diving down the rabbit hole on this problem. (Alice said to say "Hi.")

The problem appears to be that most of the IPv4 interface has broken. I've been able get at the printer web page by using an IPv6 address I found in the configuration pages. While it's amazing how much you can learn about IPv6 in three days (I don't normally do networking to this level) I haven't figured out if the LPR port is just working on v4 or if CUPS is failing over to v6.

I scrolled down far enough in my VM list to remember Windows 10. It turns out it has a built-in scanner program that works using IPv6. I keep Windows around to support one program and don't usually remember it until I need that program. If I can't fix SANE I can use Windows as a fall back. It just means more work scanning and copying the file to the host system.

It seems that for SANE to use IPv6 I need to define a link in /etc/sane.d/pixma.conf

When I do that and fire up SANE, I get an error that looks like this:

[bjnp] bjnp_allocate_device: ERROR - Cannot resolve host: FDE9 port C19E:FB1E:0:CE6B:1EFF:xxxx:xxxx:8612
[bjnp] create_broadcast_socket: ERROR - bind socket to local address failed - Address already in use

Here 8612 is the scanner port number, but SANE is parsing the first block of the IPv6 address as the host, and the rest of the line as the port descriptor. This roundly fails to work. I have tried both the link-local address and the router-supplied address, neither works for scanning. The router-supplied address is how I got to the printer web -page.

I will now be simultaneously researching partial network stack failures on Brother printers and other options for getting SANE to see the IPv6 path to the scan function.

If this information gives anyone more ideas, I'd like to hear them.

Happy Monday!