Is there a way to share a scanner with an Airport Extreme?

Question

I've got an Airport Extreme as my home network's router. (Sidebar: I love it.)

The printer sharing is pretty phenomenal - I've got my printer hooked up to the base station and all the machines in the house can print to it just fine.

However, I have one of those combined scanner/printers, and nothing on the lan seems to be able to see the scanner.

Is there a way to get the Airport Extreme / Bonjour to also share the scanner half of the device?

For the record, this is an all Windows LAN, so I'm using Bonjour for Windows to get the print sharing to work. Also, I'm hoping to not add a whole stack of extra software to the ecosystem - only one machine in the house needs the scanner, so I can just plug the printer back into that machine and share the printer that way. Still, the Airport and Bonjour seem fancy enough that this seems like it should be doable.

Answer 1

From what I can tell the Canon MF4350D is not a network-ready device. In your case the Airport Extreme is just acting as a print server. As far as I can tell the Airport can't act as a "scanner server" (nor does such a thing exist, afaik) so your best bet is to just plug the unit directly into the PC that needs to do the scanning. For what it's worth, the sibling unit of your printer, the MF4370DN, is a network-ready printer and appears to be able to scan across the network when using Canon's software.

EDIT: Apple has a document on the limitations of the Airport and printer troubleshooting. Other searches have pretty much turned up the same thing; you can use it as a print server but other features of the printer are right out.