Info and questions about Brother[tm] multifunction machine

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

In message <20120222005734.1353.qmail at joyce.lan>, John Levine wrote:

>>Regarding port 9100, my local /etc/services file says:
>>   jetdirect       9100/tcp   #HP JetDirect card
>
>That's typically known as "socket".  Works great with CUPS.

As Robert Bonomi was kind enough to relate to me, this is the most simple
& trivial way to send a document to the printer... just connect to port 9100
and then just push the file out to the printer, e.g. using `nc'.

I tried it and it works great.

>>Port 25 is apparently implementing _something_ that sort-of vaguely acts
>>like an SMTP server.
>
>Why not read the manual and find out?

Thanks John.  The question is ``Which one?''  There's at least five different
manuals for this thing on the Brother site.

And, ah, even if I was just to peruse the default (main user's manual) that
thing is like 200+ pages.

Yes, OK, call me lazy.  Much simpler to just ask the helpful folks here.

>Click the Support tab on Brother's
>web site and you can find lots and lots of documentation for that printer.

Yea, that's part of my point.  Too much of a good thing.

Anyway, just in case anybody is interested, so far this thing (MFC-7860DW)
seem to be working good for me.  I haven't tried using _every_ feature (yet),
and specifically I haven't even tried the duplex printing or the Wi-Fi
connectivity or the scanning (to PeeCee), but for printing (via USB & ethernet)
and sending and receiving FAXes it all seems to work well.  The only glitches
so far are:

1)  You gotta make a point of smushing your pages well and truly down into
the ADF or else the machine won't know they are there (apparently) and will
get confused, thinking that maybe you are trying to FAX something directly
off the flatbed.

2)  As several reviewers on Amazon reported, the thing is a bit noisy... well...
not really.  It's just different from my prior multifunction in that it has a
80mm fan on the side, and it seems to want to run it a lot... whether the
thing really needs some cooling or not.  And in an office environment, that
fan seems noisy.  The good news is that you can set the sleep timeout in the
web interface down to 1 minute, whereupon the fan only stays on for 1 minute
after actual activity and then the machine goes dead slient (``deep sleep'').


Regards,
rfg


P.S.  I just tried using the scan-to-FTP feature.  Works like a charm.
Way cool.