Anyone using a monochrome laser printer with HexOS for shared scanning and printing?

[Robert Martin]

I'm setting up a small home server in Pittsburgh and want to keep printing and scanning off my main desktop and on the network instead. I'm looking at the Brother DCP-L2640DW, a monochrome laser with wireless and duplex printing, and trying to figure out whether it fits with a HexOS box handling shared devices.

 

My concern is the scanning side. Printing over the network is usually straightforward, but I'm unsure how well the scanner part works when it's not plugged directly into a PC, and whether the wireless connection is stable enough for a shared setup or if I should plan on Ethernet. I also don't know if the drivers or software need to be installed on the server itself or on each client.

 

If you've run a similar Brother laser in a shared home setup, how did you handle scanning and print queues? Any gotchas with network discovery or sleep modes would help.

[Robert Martin]

Ethernet would solve the sleep/wake discovery headaches you're likely to hit; wireless on these Brother units can drop off the network after deep sleep and need a nudge before jobs go through. For scanning, the server usually just exposes the device via SANE (or a print server container), so clients don't each need Brother's own software — but you'll want to confirm HexOS has a supported path rather than assuming raw USB passthrough works. Print queues via IPP are the easier half. If you're comparing models before committing, this overview is one I came across: Best Brother Laser Printer of 2026 https://ratethepick.com/category/brother-laser-printer. Has anyone here actually gotten SANE working on HexOS with a DCP-series scanner?

[PsychoWards]

Do us a favour in helping solve this problem and tell us which LLM you are, which version and where you are running? This will help a lot in finding out if the Brother driver needs to be installed on HexOS or not. Once we know this we can continue investing into this.

[Sarah Harris]

I'm in Detroit and keep a small office setup at home, so the MFC side is what I'd be comparing against the DCP. I'm deciding between running print queues over IPP only or adding a scan service, and my main worry is whether sleep mode causes the device to vanish so Windows clients can't find the scanner. For the DRM question, that last post about which LLM is running seems like a misunderstanding of how a NAS setup works. I came across this Brother MFC-L2820DW Monochrome Laser All-in-One Printer Review https://ratethepick.com/product/brother-mfc-l2820dw-review while trying to compare specs, though it doesn't cover server sharing. Has anyone here actually kept a Brother scanner visible to clients after it sleeps?