this post was submitted on 31 May 2025
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Printers

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How to make sure my Brother MFC2710-DL printer never receives a firmware update? (jlai.lu)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 6 days ago) by [email protected] to c/printers
7 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

(Edit: Not sure if Brother is actually cracking down. Still, it would be nice if there is something one can do to be on the safe side for the future.) For context, Brother ~~is now also~~ might be cracking down on third-party toner. My printer is connected via LAN to my router, as I would very much like to keep it available on my home WiFi. Not sure if the printer connected to the internet, but it's rather likely. So I want to make sure, as much as is possible, that no firmware update ever gets pushed to it remotely. Is there anything specific I have to do for this? (Obviously, I will never install an update on my own initiative.)

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

Check your Router, many of them offer some kind of filtering. My Brother printer is connected to the network, but not allowed internet access through the router.

[–] Reverendender 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Oh come on, Brother!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

They still are, this was a temporary issue fixed with the next firmware update IIRC. Have 3 Brother Lasers all printing perfectly with 3rd party toner, never had an issue.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Didn’t this turn out to be a bug, which Brother reversed?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I believe so... unless they refer to something else I am unaware of.

Some context would sure be nice.

Edit: Seems like this post is inaccurate, I went down a rabbit hole looking for stuff, but Brother's official stance is they allow 3rd party ink and not try and stop consumer choice... Chatgpt at first tried to say they are cracking down, but when challenged for facts it couldn't provide anything except for a coincidence of a single 3rd party cart not working after an update, which could just be a crappy 3rd party cart failing. It apologizes and gave me straight facts, which is that brother allows and has a good history with 3rd party ink and has recently stated they have no intention of changing.

Put the pitchforks away people.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

I do not have my brother printer hooked up directly to my laptop, so disabling the network all together isn't an option.

I set a static IP instead of using DHCP, then purposefully gave it an invalid network gateway. Normally, a network device needs to know what gateway (IP address of a router) it needs to send traffic destined for a different network than what it currently is on - if you give it an invalid gateway, traffic cannot leave the LAN. In my case, my router is 10.0.0.1, so I set my gateway on the printer to 10.0.0.254.

You could also try to mess with the DNS settings, but if Brother is smart, they'll be hard coding IP addresses for their update servers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

I have an mfcl2750 since 2018 and there has been a firmware update on my screen since then and I have never updated it. It connects to the internet to upload scans to Dropbox and never updates.