# Gentoo cannot connect to Brother hl2170w printer [SOLVED]

## epsilon72

I have an aggravating problem with Gentoo and a Brother 2170w printer.  It is connected to the router via LAN.  My Debian Squeeze laptop can print with it just fine, but the Gentoo box gets stuck on "Connecting to printer..."

Gentoo's cups comes up with the wrong location for the printer every time I add it:

```
lpd://BRN001BA947C1DF/BINARY_P1
```

On Debian it is detected as:

```
dnssd://Brother%20HL-2170W%20series._pdl-datastream._tcp.local/
```

I have no idea what to do to fix this.  The cups Gentoo guide says that network printers should essentially "just work".  Any advice?Last edited by epsilon72 on Mon Oct 24, 2011 9:38 am; edited 1 time in total

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## undrwater

Have you checked your cups logs?

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## epsilon72

I tried printing a test page today, and nothing shows up in the error logs.

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## epsilon72

The problem lies in the fact that cups on Gentoo can't come up with the right location for the printer.  Shouldn't it be ipp or something instead?  Gentoo's cups also does not support dnssd, which apparently is what Debian uses to connect to it - I tried copying the printer address that Debian uses into /etc/cups/printers.conf, and it didn't work - it said that the dnssd backend was not present.

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## epsilon72

I got it to work.  For some reason, cups in Gentoo always comes up with a bogus location for this printer when adding it "the quick way".

To add this printer, in the cups web interface, I had to add a "other network printer" (LPD/LPR Host or Printer) and enter the location manually, which for this printer looks like:

```
lpd://<ip-address-of-printer>/BINARY_P1
```

Gentoo doesn't have a ppd driver specifically for the Brother HL2170w series, so I borrowed the one that Debian auto-selects.  One gentoo's drivers may work though, if you don't have any Debian computers around.

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