How do you share a printer without WiFi? I plug it into a NAS, and the old laser machine turns into a FamilyMart print server

her daughter-in-law's workplace phased out office equipment, she brought home an HP LaserJet 1108. Black-and-white laser machines, items from Xianyu for a few dozen yuan, compatible 2612A toner cartridges for just over forty yuan can print over a thousand images, and one sheet for papers and drafts costs two or three cents—it's like getting free pickup.

only one flaw: no WiFi. Whoever wants to print goes to the study, turns on the computer, plugs in the USB cable, and unplugs the cable. After a month, my wife would rather copy it by hand than touch it. Until I plugged it into the Flying Niu NAS at home—now FamilyMart phones can just tap and call, and the iPhone's air printing is still a waste.

first explain why we kept this old machine. The 1108 was a model around 2011, with 18 pages per minute, and it took only about ten seconds from standby to the first page. The L3255 ink chamber at home has color photos and scans ( have written about it in the scanning article). Black-and-white documents emphasize tossing casually, typing casually, and feeling no regret after typing. This laser machine is exactly the right match.

2612A This toner cartridge is its greatest asset. The original is expensive, the compatible ones cost just over forty yuan, and if you run out of followers, you can still buy more followers to fight again. I did the math: the papers, mistakes, and mental math cards printed by my child each semester would at most be two packs of paper a year, enough for two years. The speed was even faster than the ink chamber machine; thirty pages of papers were finished in just over a minute, and the ink chamber machine was still pausing in the middle. Some people might say there are small printer server boxes online costing just a few dozen yuan, or routers with USB ports that can carry printers—both are fine, but my NAS is always on 24/7, so it's just a container—there's no need to spend that money.

pity it only has one USB cable. Whichever computer you plug in, only that computer can work; When the computer shuts down, the printer also "shuts down." This fatal flaw is the same as the about connecting a printer to a Xiaomi router: USB printers must be shared with computers, and the host must be turned on. My NAS is powered on every day, so letting it serve as the main unit makes perfect sense.

pour cold water on the matter: Synology's old path has already been cut off by the official side

Before

started, I searched for "NAS print server." Eight out of ten tutorials are about Synology: Control Panel → External Devices → Printer. Just check the sharing box and you're done. If you follow the search method, you'll probably end up searching the backend like I did, with no entry point at all, and start to wonder if your DSM is installed incorrectly.

I only gave up after checking Synology's official compatibility list, and at the top of the page was a note: DSM and SRM platforms have discontinued USB printer support. In other words, this feature was indeed present in the DSM 6 era, but after DSM 7, the official team removed it. All the tutorials online are outdated.

So whether your home is Synology or Feiniu, there's one common path now: install CUPS in Docker. CUPS is the Linux world-managed printing service, and it is also the underlying layer of macOS's print system. Once the container runs, the USB printer is managed by it, and then it broadcasts to the local area network.

Feiniu Mounting CUPS: Four Parameters Are Enough

Docker What is it, how do containers fit? 829 the article that covered the concepts, if you haven't touched it, check it out first. If you want to systematically learn it, read complete introductory . Here, I'll only talk about how to start printing this container.

image uses olbat/cupsd, which can be found on Docker Hub. It comes with CUPS 2.4 and avahi (the one that handles AirPrint broadcasting). When I built a container, I filled in four things:

here's a little USB port incident: on my N100, one port is occupied by the hard drive enclosure of the download drive ( the old SSD in the warehouse drive), and the printer plugs into another port, which happens to be full. If your machine only has one port, add a power hub to prevent the printer from competing with the hard drive. If the power is insufficient, the printer will recognize and won't operate, causing paper jams and clogging of the machine.

privileged is a lazy choice; the standard approach is to map /dev/bus/usb into the container. For home internal networks, I choose 'Hassle'; if you care, follow the rules. Synology users can follow this path too: install a Container Manager in the package center, search for the same image in the registry, copy the parameters directly, no different from Feiniu—after all, Docker is Docker everywhere.

browser to enter page 631, then install the printer in five steps

After

container runs and the browser accesses http://NAS IP:631, the CUPS management page is halfway down. Don't be scared by this retro page—it hasn't been renovated for over ten years, but it's still very useful.

• Administration Tab → Click Add Printer
• pop-up asking for account and password, which is the default admin account for the image. The password is written in the image document
• Local You can see the USB printer in Printers, with the name labeled USB. Select Next
• Name description is whatever you like, Share This Printer must be checked with ; otherwise, other devices won't see it.
• searching for model in the driver list, 1108 won't be found. I chose Tongxin's LaserJet 1020 (foo2zjs driver), and everything works fine

At the end, when you click Print Test Page in Maintenance, the printer will pop up a test page with a squeak, and that's a 90% chance of success. If the test page is listed, don't doubt the specs for now—check the USB cable and power supply later—my first trip was on the hub power supply, the printer was in the container, but when sending tasks, it never produced paper.

a quick note about the drive step: older laser machines usually have matching models in the list, while the 1020, 1005, and 1108 generations use the same solution; If you really can't find it, choose Everywhere (the original queue), letting the client's own drivers do the work—Windows and iPhone can handle it.

three pieces of equipment, three connection methods

Windows 11: Set → Bluetooth and other devices → printer and scanner → add devices. Wait for it to search on its own; most chances are not to find it. Click "Add Manually," choose "Choose shared printer by name," and enter the http://NAS IP:631/printers/queue name. The queue name is the same as the name I chose in the previous step. Here's an annoying pitfall: if the name contains a space, the URL has to be replaced with %20, so I always use only letters and numbers for my name. Click Next, Windows will install the universal driver yourself.

iPhone is a surprise. No need to install anything—just the print sharing menu automatically shows up as the "HP LaserJet 1108," which is the AirPrint service broadcast by avahi over the local area network. The old laser machine transformed into an air printer. My wife saw it for the first time and even asked me what software I had secretly installed.

Android runs the system's default print service, add an IPP printer, and the address is exactly the same as Windows'. If you want to type files from WeChat, the method is the same as in the about printing on your phone. First, go through the mini-program. If the mini-program doesn't recognize the NAS, it saves the files to your phone first, then goes through the system to print.

three pits, each more hidden than the last

pitfall 1: Printer power-off and restart, queue freezes. One time, after finishing a type, I casually turned off the printer's power and tried again the next day. All the tasks were piled up in the queue, and the status bar was just a line of 'Processing' hanging forever. The reason is that after re-enumerating USB devices, CUPS didn't keep up; rebooting the container worked again. The simple method is to cancel all the stuck tasks on page 631 first, then restart the container. If the order is reversed, the ghost will revive. Nowadays, printers are often powered on, with standby at two or three watts, and the annual electricity cost is just over yuan. Compared to family members who can't print, that's nothing.

Pitfall 2: The printer disappeared from the iPhone. This is Avahi's broadcast name matching the host machine's, so rebooting the container usually brings it back; If that doesn't work, change the host-name in the avahi configuration to be explicitly changed. The root of this kind of 'device not found' problem is the same as mDNS : if the broadcast can't reach, the client is blind.

Pitfall 3: After the NAS restarts, the container didn't get up, and the printers disappeared en masse. Remember to set the container restart policy to always. This was discussed in the of container upgrades. Let's double-check here. During the power outage at my home, the UPS held the network (1025 that time). After the power came back, the NAS woke up on its own, and the print container got up on its own without failing.

who is worth struggling with, and who should you avoid

my final layout: L3255 handles color, photos, and scanning, 1108 hangs NAS for black-and-white drafts, whoever wants to type can tap on their phone, and the computer in the study finally got out of the printer's job. Once that USB cable was plugged in, no one unplugged it again.