[PLUG] Brother Linux & tech support

[JP Vossen <jp@jpsdomain.org>]

Summary: Brother supports Linux well, if quietly, and has been very 
helpful and responsive to problems.  I'm pleased and impressed with both 
the company and the printer.

Details:

I've previously posted about my search for a relatively high-end color 
multi-function laser printer that would work well with Linux, including 
scanning over Ethernet.  I finally settled on a Brother MFC-9840CDW and 
I've been very happy with it.  [1]

Linux is still a second-class citizen, but at least it's a citizen, and 
once I found the *.debs they installed easily and everything (and I mean 
everything) Just Worked [2].  That is, until my Ethernet port stopped 
working.

So I tried sending some email via a web form which had previously 
worked, but no one ever got back to me.  I finally called Brother tech 
support and after a relatively painless few minutes of t-shooting, I was 
asked what OS I used.  I said "lots" and we narrowed it down to what I 
could easily plug into the printer USB, which turned out to be Linux.  I 
was then told that that precluded any more software testing (which is 
presumably Windows/Mac only), so I was authorized to take it to the 
closest service center for a warranty repair.

Note that the "Linux" word did not cause any "what?", or "I'll have to 
transfer you to a whole other department even though this is obviously a 
hardware problem that the OS has nothing to do with (I'm looking at you 
Dell!)" issues.  It was just, "OK, well in that case we'll do this."  Nice.

I called a local service center and talked to the guy there.  I was not 
impressed with his phone presence, but...  Then I took the printer there 
and, let's just said it did not go at all well and I did not leave the 
printer there.  When I got home I sent am email to a different address 
at Brother with the details.

The next day I got a call that Brother was dispatching a tech to my 
house to fix the printer, which happened and it's now working after a 
main-board replacement & some minor fiddling.  I also got another call 
from someone following up on the shady practices of the service center 
(which may not be one much longer), and a later follow-up call from the 
same person on the repair itself.

I was and am pleased and impressed with Brother's support and 
responsiveness to problems and with the printer itself.  I highly 
recommend it to anyone interested in something in it's class.

My $0.02,
JP

[1] http://lists.netisland.net/archives/plug/plug-2008-12/msg00063.html
[2] For various values of "Just Works" given that there was a minor 
AppArmor problem.  See [1] for details.
----------------------------|:::======|-------------------------------
JP Vossen, CISSP            |:::======|      http://bashcookbook.com/
My Account, My Opinions     |=========|      http://www.jpsdomain.org/
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"Microsoft Tax" = the additional hardware & yearly fees for the add-on
software required to protect Windows from its own poorly designed and
implemented self, while the overhead incidentally flattens Moore's Law.
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