I cannot connect to my Brother MFC-9130CW printer. I called Brother support and they determined that it was a "security issue" and suggested that I buy a firewall from Dell or Cisco. My MBP already has a firewall, so my question is - is this legit, or is it a scam?
MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 15.6
Can't speak to Brother printers but I can say that I was really frustrated with my HP "randomly" not connecting with my MBP, whereas my iMac printed to it with no problem. Almost tore my hair out before I figured out that it was my VPN. I have to turn off the VPN to print; could your firewall be creating the same issue?
How is your printer connected to your MB, by cable or wirelessly?
Try the following; Solve printing problems on Mac
and Reset the printing system on your Mac to solve a problem-Apple Support
I get the impression that the people at Brother only have experience helping Windows users.
To me it appears there is no direct support for macOS https://support.brother.com/g/b/downloadtop.aspx?c=us&lang=en&prod=mfc9130cw_us
That said, it appears that a lot of Apple's printer support I have seen as regards to Brother printers and recent macOS versions is to use Airprint. See if you can get it to work with Airprint and if you cannot, consider returning it to Brother.
About AirPrint - Apple Support
> I called Brother support and they determined that it was a "security issue" and suggested that I buy a firewall from Dell or Cisco
Assuming the printer is on your LAN, adding a hardware firewall to your network is a complete and utter waste of money and will in no way help getting your Mac to print to the printer. The only two things it does is a) pour more of your money down the drain, and b) get you off the support line with Brother so their support stats look better.
I absolutely guarantee that if you do go and buy a 'firewall from Dell or Cisco' (why on earth Dell, of all places??), and you call them back with the same problem (because this advice will do NOTHING to help your problem), their response will be "go talk to Dell/Cisco support since the firewall is not our product/problem". 100%
Fact is, this printer should work out of the box (which is why there's no downloadable driver on their site - it shouldn't be needed), so that leads to a question of why the OS can't see the printer.
Most often that's going to come down to a configuration issue, for which you're going to need to know more details about the printer. It looks like the printer has a built-in web interface... can you hit the printer's IP address in your web browser? There may be something in there that enables/disables specific features that you need (such as LPR or IPP (IPP is a subset of Apple's AirPrint and is used as the underlying technology).
Brother Printer and Firewall Requirement?
