>Is your lan not connected to the internet?

Certainly not except for the few dedicated internet PC's handled by IT for email, browsing and company-wide office apps. Those have so many layers of hardware firewalls and other passive & active security it's not easy to get as much office work done as in earlier years, but we work around it.

In my chem lab with all those expensive (some vintage) scientific instruments, I air-gapped ASAP when I came on board. I have made lots of scientifc progress but the most valuable thing I've done for my employer is kicking IT out of the lab. 100x reliability after that, averaging less than a single need for attention per year.

Here's something I just found out recently.

Had one of the Windows 10 2019 vintage (installed from unpatched ISO) PC's on my isolated local XP network, where a very old Lexmark non-network USB/parallel printer on an XP workstation was just a regular USB printer being shared with the rest of the LAN by XP.

The Lexmark was a business machine installed with 32-bit XP drivers which were available in about 2016, which was about the latest it was supported, which support ended with Windows 7.

Luckily it turned out I had chosen the PCL6 version of the drivers.

When I had added the 2019 W10 PC I had naturally used a 32-bit version since this one does not need to use more than 3.2GB of memory at all. With the local LAN & W10 configured (not so easy) so W10 could easily access the Lexmark shared by XP, upon first connection W10 requests the Lexmark drivers before it will proceed. I used the W7 PCL6 drivers and everything was just fine for years.

Unfortunately the Lexmark tragically succumbed to an untimely death before it reached its 21st birthday.

Then I was able to select a consumer-grade new Brother USB/LAN/Wifi unit having a model No only available from Walmart (over the last few years since release) as the best bargain. Only an inconsequential distinguishing feature difference from the non-walmart generally available equal-printing-performance machine. It's another whole story but was out of stock for $89 with no sign of restocking, appearing discontinued and replaced by a new equivalent model for $139. I knew people must have bought quite a few at $89 before they were all "gone", and could see lots of them NIB for $139 on Amazon. I dug in and found a refurbished (designated 1 item remaining in stock) for $79 and it arrived shortly from walmart.com. Looked like a NIB return with a refurb sticker on the back. There was still "one" remaining in stock for weeks after that when I checked. Hmm.

Never uninstalled the Lexmark drivers, just plugged Brother into USB of the XP PC, used the Brother W7 driver, and worked like it should on XP, shared with the local LAN no differently than the Lexmark had been. Office manager and IT couldn't believe I got a brand new printer to just drop-in to my decades-old XP network when it was not officially supported for XP.

Newer W10 & W11 ISO's were used on a couple new local workstations but these were so new they were already sporting the "Print Nightmare" "upgrade" so no shared network printing for you. Oh, well. Turns out, naturally you can't use the printer's LAN connection simultaneously with its Wifi, but I wasn't actually using either, just USB. And the Wifi-Direct option worked just great[0] to connect to one of the new W10/W11 PC's on an individual ad-hoc basis as needed and everything was well from those wifi PC's and laptops when they needed to occasionally print. No Wifi-Direct conflict with the USB connection shared by XP over the local LAN at all.

Now I don't actually use the instrument the 2019 W10 PC is connected to very often and was occasionally printing from it over the shared XP LAN for a number of months before I recently remembered I had never installed any Brother printer drivers at all, never even made an explicit request to connect to the Brother on the shared LAN like I had to do when I first got the Lexmark going. Double-checked and nothing but Lexmark as default printer on that W10 PC.

Brother just worked. Really dropped right in in this regard.

PCL6 FTW.

[0]>likes to go into this deep sleep mode

If asleep, must be woken up from the main wired LAN the USB printer is sharing, before connecting a session of Wifi-Direct.

Edit: you may be able to set the sleep delay from the printer keyboard.