**Update April-ish 2023** So at some point in the past, the printer began falling off the network again. It lasted many months, but something changed (unifi firmware, printer firmware, who knows). The good news though is that I was able to fix it again for the time being!
I was noticing it was falling off at night, which was odd. The only thing going on at night was…Nightly Channel Optimizations. Well, in the latest Unifi Controller (I’m on 7.3.83), you have the ability to exclude specific APs from doing those optimizations. As I had tied the printer to the single AP, I just added that to the exclusion and…tada it’s been on the network for the last 29 days again. Talk about frustrating – this is totally a Brother Wifi thing as no other device in the house has this problem.
And back to the original article…
Having your printer continual to fall off WiFi is the worst. Whenever you actually want to print something, lo-and-behold, you can’t, and you need to spend 2-20 mins fiddling with it to get it back on the network. While all mine took was a printer restart for it to magically reconnect to wifi, this is always how I felt.
After enough frustration, I finally took some time to sit down and fix the problem. After a bit of searching, I stumbled upon this Brother article (granted I’m printing from a Windows PC and my specific printer is a Brother MFC-L2750DW). That at least gave me some hope, as I was using a single SSID for both 5Ghz and 2.4Ghz – you know, like a sane person.
With the above article in hand, I created a new SSID that was only on the 2.4Ghz with the following settings (Unifi Controller 7.0.23):
New UI:
- Broadcasting APs: I have it set to just the 1 where closest to the printer
- WiFi Band: 2.4Ghz
- WiFi Type: Standard
- Multicast Management:
- Multicast Enhancement: ▢
- Multicast and Broadcast Control: ▢
- Client Device Isolation: ▢
- Proxy ARP: ▢
- BSS Transition: ▢
- UAPSD: ▢
- Fast Roaming: ▢
- 802.11 DTIM Period: Auto
- Minimum Data Rate Control: Auto
- Security Protocol: WPA2
- PMF: Optional
- Group Rekey Interval: ▣ 3600 seconds
- Hide WiFi Name: ▣
Legacy UI:
- Security: WPA Personal
- WiFi Band: 2.4Ghz
- WPA3: ▢
- Guest Policy: ▢
- Broadcasting APs: I have it set to just the 1 where closest to the printer
- Multicast and Broadcast Filtering: ▢
- Fast Roaming: ▢
- Hide SSID: ▣
- Group Rekey Interval: GTK rekeying every 3600 seconds
- UAPSD: ▢
- Multicast Enhancement: ▢
- RADIU DAS/DAC (CoA): ▢
- Beacon Country: ▢
- BSS Transition: ▢
- TDLS Prohibit: ▢
- Point to Point: ▢
- P2P Cross Connect: ▢
- Proxy ARP: ▢
- L2 Isolation: ▢
- Legacy Support: ▢
- PMF: Optional
- WPA Mode: WPA2 Only
- DTIM Mode: Use Default Values
- 2G Data Rate Control: ▣
- 6Mbps
- Disable CCK Rates: ▢
- Also require clients to use rates at or above the specified value: ▢
- Send beacons at 1Mbps: ▢
The printer has been online for over 20 days, whereas before it would fall off the network sometimes before it even fell asleep. 🎉🎉
Hopefully this helps someone else out there.