General setup

The L2750DW was surprisingly painless to set up. It connected to Wi-Fi without issue, and even inputting a lengthy key via the on-device on-screen keyboard wasn’t too bad.

It does not support RADIUS-based authentication, which is a shame, but I had an SSID available for the network in question, so not too problematic.

The password for the admin interface is on a sticker on the back of the device.

Printing from Linux

Setting up printing on Linux was also pretty painless.

I got the drivers from https://www.brother.co.uk/support/mfc-l2750dw/downloads, read the installation shell script and, other than noting that it was going to use --force-enabled (or perhaps --force-architecture) for the dpkg installation because it is for i386 not amd64, nothing bad jumped out. So I ran it.

I am using a socket over http to make it work - I have a domain name set up for the printer, pointing to the IP address, so it was just:

http://printer.example.com

and I suspect

http://ip.addr.ess

would work fine too.

I have not tried https for printing, although the printer has its own, self-signed, certificate, and the ability to upload a certificate of your own choosing. For my needs, http is fine.

The driver I am using is Brother MFCL2750DW for CUPS. This handles duplex, multiple pages per side, and so on.

I also set it up on macOS, without an issue.

I have yet to tackle printing from my wife’s iPhone. The MFCL2750DW has AirPrint, but since it is on a different VLAN from our phones/computers, I doubt this will work. I’m expecting to set up an mDNS/Avahi announcer, and then it “should” work. But I’ve yet to do that.

Scanning

I wanted to scan to a network drive, and the MFCL2750DW supports CIFS, so that was easy.

On the server side, I set up a CIFS server, defined a share for the scanner in /etc/samba/smb.conf, and created a local user for the scanner (useradd smbscanner), and then a samba user/password with the same user (smbpasswd -a smbscanner). One wrinkle I found was that the scanner did not accept my original, strong password for CIFS, and I had to weaken it (by running smbpasswd -a smbscanner again).

I set up a scan directory - I used /var/scans/ - and, within that, a “landing” directory, into which the scanner will deliver scans. (This is to help with the OCR workflow, of which more below.) I sorted out the firewalling - NetBIOS and CIFS, although I’m not 100% sure I need the NetBIOS ports (137-139) open.

And… it worked. First time.

Overall, scanning performance is adequate. But nothing more than that. It’s slow. And the image output is less than brilliant, even at the snail-like 600 DPI.

My ScanSnap ix500 was much faster and produced better quality PDFs, but I can’t find it a way to work as a network device (e.g. scanning to a CIFS share) under Linux. So I will have to accept what I have.

Automatically OCRing text

The MFCL2750DW does not do on-board OCRing of PDFs. I was not expecting it to.

I am doing this on the server side, once the scan lands in the “landing” directory. My way is quick and dirty, using a cronjob which runs every minute, rather than inotify or similar, but it works…

The script I am using is, again, a very basic one, with zero error handling: if it doesn’t work, the un-OCR’d PDF is still available, and I can OCR it manually.

#!/bin/bash

for file in /var/scans/landing/*.pdf ;

do

 if [ -f "$file" ]; then

BASENAMEFILE=$(/usr/bin/basename $file)

/bin/echo $BASENAMEFILE

OCRDFILENAME=${BASENAMEFILE%.*}_OCR.pdf

/bin/echo "Running ocrmypdf on $file, output will be /var/scans/$OCRDFILENAME"

/usr/bin/ocrmypdf "$file" "/var/scans/$OCRDFILENAME"

/bin/mv "$file" /var/scans/Not_OCRd

fi
            
done;

Overall impressions

Printing works. It does duplex. Time to first print is fine.

Scanning works well enough, albeit it slowly.

It was reasonably straightforward to set up.

It looks like it can do plenty of fancy stuff, like digitally signing scans.