Can't Access networked Brother Laser printer- To print or use Web I/f

I have a home network that includes-

• Two Windows 7 PCs
• Two Linux machines
• A Brother MFC7820N networked multifunction printer

All the above are on wired connections. Then there's an 802.11n wireless link for laptops and media devices.

I'm just setting up a new machine that's running Windows 10 Home, using the wireless network. I was annoyed to find that Brother don't have a full-function Windows 10 driver for the 7820N that supports scanning, but the Brother site says the built-in drivers in Win 10 should work for basic printing.

Problem

1. I successfully added the printer device to Windows 10 (at the 3rd attempt) using the "manual advanced" method. The printer has an entry in the hosts file, and was added by host name.
2. The printer fails to print, with a "not responding" type message. The driver also can't pick up the status info from the printer.

What's really weird is-

1. I can ping the printer from the W10 box (and the other machines) by either IP address or hostname.
2. However, this printer has a web interface. I can access this from any of the Windows 7 machines, but the Windows 10 machine says "web site failed to respond" or somesuch. This happens with any of: Edge, IE11, or Chrome browsers.
3. I can't even make a manual connection (telnet to port 80) from the Win 10 machine (timeout).
4. The Windows 10 machine CAN access all the other devices on the home network, including the web servers (Apache) on both the Linux boxes.

This looks like the web access to that particular address is being blocked somehow. I have tried disabling my AntiVirus package (Kaspersky), but that makes no difference.

Does anyone have a clue as to what's going on here? Is Win10 perhaps detecting an "old" web server on the printer and refusing to talk to it? (and why would that prevent printing using lpd?)

Thanks for the comments, but while the lack of a proper device driver for the printer is annoying, it's not the main issue.

My main concern is the odd behaviour of networking in Windows 10.

For example, half the time Win10 itself seems to ignore entries in the hosts file. My network is too small to bother to run an ActiveDirectory server, so I use hosts entries to map names to IP addresses for local machines.

From what i can tell, Win10 ignores the hosts file unless file and printer sharing is turned on, which makes little sense as I don't want to share files or printers FROM the Win10 box. The use of hosts also seems to be affected by using DHCP to auto-configure the network settings, which is a pain if (as I do) you have two Internet routers available, and one (on the EE 4G network) uses a proxy but I still need to see the entries in hosts.

Google Chrome also seems to ignore hosts by default, which just added to the confusion until I worked out what was going on.

Now, with file+print sharing enabled and networking set up for no proxy, a pattern has emerged.

The Win10 box can access everything on the local network that is a computer. I.e. both my Limux machines (which each have Apache running), and the Win7 PCs that share files and/or printers.

However the two web-enabled devices that aren't computers, i.e. the Brother printer and my ADSL router are both pretty much inaccessible from Win10, whereas they work fine with Windows 7.

Sometimes I get a home page, or part of it, from either device on the Win10 machine, but any attempt to navigate the web interfaces just ends up in blank screens or timeouts. Now as it happens both the router and the pinter are a few years old, so I am guessing that maybe Win10 now assumes some sort of protocol handshake that these old web servers don't fully support.

Unfortunately that is only a guess, and i don't have many clues on how to diagnose the problem at this point. Next step in to install Firefox+Firebug and try to see what's going on down at the http connection level.

One thing it has proven, I am VERY glad I did't upgrade my main PC to Windows 10 when the taskbar nag started appearing. If I had I would have been stuck with no way to print or manage my network.

I'm surprised to find Microsoft screwing up something as fundamental as IP networking in a major new OS release. Maybe by the time the first Service Pack comes out Windows 10 will be ready for daily use.

Ok, lets take these comments one at a time-

• 10586 has some serious Network issues that are currently still unresolved in the current insider version.

My machine reports 10.0 Build 10240, which seems to be the most current public update

• Hosts is outdated with 10. Do not know why you brought up AD. Especially that no one mentioned it.

Modifying the hosts file is the most basic standard way of mapping hostnames to IP addresses. If you want to avoid changing hosts files, you need to be running either a local DNS server + proxy inside your own network, or an Active Directory (AD) server. That's why I mentioned it. I have no desire to try to run an AD server, but if hosts doesn't work it's one of the few other options.

• You would be better off using OpenDNS for blocking certain websites.

I'm not trying to block sites. I am using hosts to map names to local IP addresses for machines that are on my private network.

• Telnet does not use Port 80, so I do not see why you are trying to do that.

Telnet uses port 23 by default. However it can use any other port if required, it's a command-line parameter. Connecting to port 80 with telnet and sending a GET / command is a crude but effective way of checking a web server is accessible. Try it on Google

• Also you are better off only having one Apache Server for all Webpages on the LAn, not having multiple.

Better off for what? The two Linux boxes both run web servers to make different services available. They run on separate IP addresses, there are no conflicts.

• If you are having multiple IP issues. Sounds like when you were mucking around, trying different things, you messed up all machines in the process.

I have 2 Windows PCs, 2 Linux machines, and 2 other hard-wired Ethernet devices- an ADSL router and the Brother printer. This has all been in place for a couple of years or more. None of that has changed and it all still works.

• Concentrate on one item only, not 20 different things. Forget about the printer at the moment, until you get everything else figured out. You will still need a new printer, since the one you have is very dated.

I introduced one new PC, running Windows 10, and edited the hosts file on that machine (only) to get it to see the rest of the network. It's hard to see how much less I could have changed.

Most things are figured out. Computer-computer connections are working fine. It is only access to the router and the printer that are causing problems.

• Microsoft did not screw anything up. You mucking around, trying to fix something that was not broken, is what is causing your problems.

Over the years I have had maybe 10 different Windows PCs on my network, including the two Win7 machines most recently. All the others worked with few if any problems.

Windows 10 is having problems connecting to 2 local devices with simple http interfaces. I think that indicates Microsoft changed (and broke) something.