Mageia forum

Hi all, I have several printers I use: Laser for most printing/cheapest printing. An A3 wide format injet for A3 printing: And a photo quality injet for photos.

The photo and A3 printers are quite old and functional, but long, long out of firmware updates/support.

What is the safest way to connect these to my network? They have wireless, but I imagine connecting to the router via Ethernet is best, although I'm wondering if I run them via my server with a print server would be safer still?

Any input welcome.

With safe, do you mean reliability (always working, accessible from all computers on the local net) or security (against internet threats)?

Well if you're talking about network security, then you probably shouldn't attach them to any kind of network at all if you're really that worried.
Doesn't really matter that much how you connect them, although the least insecure way would probably to attach them locally to your box, and then share the printers with your CUPS server.
But usability wise that means your box would always have to run, and only devices that support CUPS could print.
Would probably be much easier if you connect all of them to a small printserver, then every devices that supports network printing via IPP could print.

Although on the other hand, what would be the worst that could happen? Somebody prints until paper or ink/toner is empty ...

Yes, security wise: My understanding (very weak) is that being an old wifi device is like holding the door open to our network?
I do have a box on constantly (nextcloud), although I believe my Asus router can be a print server also...
But just Ethernet sounds like it will be fine too.