MX922 FAX USB drive

[tcarmosino]

Can the MX922 FAX USB drive be accessed from my network as a mapped drive? Because I get many "spam" faxes, all faxes are being saved to the USB drive. I would like to map a drive instead of moving the drive to my computer.

[Michael]

Hello tcarmosino.

Unfortunately, we cannot support mapping your USB flash drive to the network.  We can only advise that you access the drive locally by connecting the flash drive directly the computer itself.

[lwiniarski]

This makes no sense.   it OUGHT to be possible to do this.  It's ridiculous to have a "Wireless" scanner that requires a person to physically move the memory from computer to computer just to access.   You obviously have a webserver built in, so It's nearly 0% effort to allow at least read-only access to the USB flash drive.

(in fact I probably believe it is an undocumented feature that we just can't use yet)   Can you please find out how to do it?

The scanning feature would be hugely improved if it was able do this.   Otherwise it's just very annoying.

[das1996]

This is a shortcoming of many canon and other manufacturer connected devices.

An AIO that has a ethernet/wifi capability and usb port which accomodates a flash drive should be able to bind the two together and allow network access to the storage medium in the usb port.  Canon customer services suggests this is offered in enterprise level equipment - it better be!  What's missing is a built in file server.  I suppose they can't give you all the features in consumer grade equipment.

The solution is to use something else on the network for the usb flash drive.  Many router these days include at least 1 or more usb ports and have basic file server capabiltiies even with stock firmware.  Your printer must allow you to save the document on a network share.  Rather than configuring the share on another computer, point it towards the NAS (network attached storage) device defined on the router (usually 192.168.1.1).  Some even support saving to remote ftp servers.

The software I'm running on my router only allows defining of one username/password for the network attached device (flash drive).  This is a bit of an issue as I don't really want/need the printer to see any other content on the nas other than where it'll be storing documents.  Fortunately the mf628 does support access to remote ftp sites.

I created a dedicated login/password for the printer and defined access to a single folder on the nas.  I can still access the rest of the storage space as a network share from any computer on the network. 

Also, fwiw, unless you have a need to print from the cloud, I see no reason why a printer needs internet access at all.  I blocked all access by not defining a gateway and dns server entries in the tcpip settings (all set to 0.0.0.0).

Good luck and hopefully this points you in the right direction.