printer moved to new location= CUPS cannot find its drivers anymore

[Marco Fioretti]

Hello all,
A couple years ago I bought an EPSON XP-4100 printer/scanner, attached it to an USB port of my Ubuntu Desktop and it was detected and worked with little or no problems.
Last week, changes in home furniture forced me to move that printer from below my desk to the room where the ADSL modem is. So I attached it to the USB port of the modem, configured the latter to share the printer on the LAN,and the modem said OK, RECOGNIZED that it is an EPSON XP-4100 and said printer now usable from modem.ip.address:631/printers/printer-name
Then I opened the CUPS server of my desktop, locahost:631, went to "add printer", chose ipp (via http) as connectio method, and provided the network address above.
The problem is that my when I enter the printer maker to choose the driver in my local CUPS, it does NOT list Epson XP-4100 as an available driver. Which is not true, because that same CUPS server had been using that same printer for 2 years without problems, until I unplugged it and attached it to the modem port.
What the hell happened, and how to fix it? I **have** read around how to install epson drivers, but why should I do it in the first place? Did removing the printer erase its drivers too? If so, why on Earth? Stupid move, it would be. And in any case, I downloaded the .deb package from the Epson website to reinstall, but could not do it because broken dependencies (on Ubuntu 21.04) on the lsb package. This is where I am right now. Any step towards a solution, and an explanation or hypothesis of what actually happened and why, would be REALLY welcome...
TIA,
Marco
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