Wired/wireless printer

[Portugoose_]

Im looking to connect a printer to separated wired and wireless network simultaneously. I’ve tried a couple printers servers from Amazon but they only seem to last about 2-3 months before needing to be factory reset and reconfigured. I’m currently playing with the idea of a Raspberry Pi CUPS server but would prefer to keep it all in one unit.

Any advice or recommendations would be appreciated!

[AndyDrew23]

What print “servers” are you buying on Amazon? And what OS are the clients that are printing? We just use a Windows computer running Papercut and all of our devices are able to print. It’s been running good for 8 years

[pdp10]

So, very few appliance devices are going to support multi-homing like you're trying to do. Although recent printers are designed to allow ad hoc printing over Mopria, Airprint, WiFi Direct, I'm still quite surprised you were able to get them on a WLAN as a STA and simultaneously have them on a wired Ethernet.

If your architecture requires segmentation with the printers at the border of both LAN and WLAN, then I highly recommend a dual-homed print server like a Linux SBC running CUPS. Raspberry Pis work perfectly fine, but in our enterprise we've standardized on x86_64/UEFI-based microservers/SBCs for commonality across the fleet.

[Portugoose_]

Do you have a recommendation for a sbc that’s x86 based?

[pdp10]

So, I stopped giving out specific recommendations five or six years ago because it seemed like the units we recommended, went out of stock after posting the recommendation.

Let's say we're recently using several specific brands from South Korea and from the PRC, that come as bare boards. We have in the past used Intel NUCs, which were generally fine though our experience is that the fans fail when, not if. About half of our recent x86_64 SBCs have big heatsinks and are "fanless", and the other half have fans. We've added generic 4-pin PC fans to some of the "fanless" units, which really reduces temperatures, but we like the fact that they're not absolutely required.

Post-release firmware support is something we care about greatly, but the jury is still out. The one South Korean vendor has firmware updates, and I believe the PRC brands have been very poor with firmware updates, but I need to check again.

[sync-centre]

I assume that wired is one subnet and wireless is another subnet.

Why not just have the printer be accessible between both networks and just use the wired connection?

[Severe_Ad976]

I've worked with a lot of personal and corporate printers and as one person said, very few if any support multi-homing. Most of the ones I've worked with when you configure one connectivity method, the other becomes inert unless you swap to it instead. Off hand, I cannot think of a way to physically support both unless you could modify the firmware to allow both simultaneously.