Your 1. seems good enough as a starter, yeah. I’ll probably tell my users to ditch the app altogether otoh, so I’m looking forward to the Pi as a long-term solution
Though, what kind of non-tech nightmares are you referring to? I’d think that if being done properly and with autodiscovery enabled, it would be as seamless as “connect to printer/scanner X on the network” which is the Pi itself. But I probably haven’t understood enough
Damn, I didn’t know devices do these dynamic MACs, but yeah it’s not a trusted field to begin with.
By IPP autodiscovery, do you mean mDNS? If so, does the router needs to install avahi as well for single-network discovery to work? Or just the client?
Avahi on the router for multi VLAN discovery seem to be a nice idea, I’ll look into it and maybe try to hook it up to solution 2. I’ve thought users could just manually input the IP addresses (and the non-tech users will just simply be onboarded by me anyways), but having it advertised by default may just be less of a hassle for them.
Hi all, thanks for all your comments and suggestions, here’s a late update:
I went with option 2 and configured the second VLAN + Wifi with the printer on it. The process was smooth except for half a day troubleshooting why DHCP was not possible (turns out I have to manually tell dnsmasq to listen on the new interface as well…). I set up a static IP address for the printer though. Adding the machine from my other devices involve manually typing out its IP, something I hope to resolve with an avahi daemon on the router later on.
For Android specifically, printing can be configured through its “Default Print Service” which can be found in Settings. Scanning requires a separate app, and I found ScanBridge to be exactly what I need and also FOSS. The address to type in is
http://$PRINTER_IP_ADDRESS/eSCL/(note the trailing slash). There’s also Mopria Scan, which is proprietary.If you use a VPN on the Android, remember to exempt the print service and scan app from the tunnel.