Episode: 1864
Title: HPR1864: Turning an old printer into a network printer
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1864/hpr1864.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 10:23:18

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This is HPR Episode 1864 entitled Turning an Old printer into a network printer.
It is hosted by Dave Morris and is about 21 minutes long.
The summary is using a Raspberry Pi and a Print Boomer for an old USB printer.
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Hello everyone, my name is Dave Morris here in Edinburgh.
Today I've got a talk for you about some stuff I've been doing over the past few months.
I've entitled it Turning an Old printer into a network printer.
I bought a USB printer back in 2005 when I bought a family PC, a Windows PC.
It's an HP printer. It's an inkjet. It's called a Photosmart2410.
It's one of these things that's got a scanner in it.
It can do faxes. I don't think I've ever used that feature.
It can read various types of cards but not any of the new styler.
Yeah, it did a range of cards. Anyway, it's not been used.
I've stopped using the Windows PC for many years now.
It's only a Pentium 4 and nobody particularly wanted Windows XP and stuff.
So the printer has been left gathering dust in a corner for a long time.
Recently I thought it would be useful to maybe see if I could wake it up, bring it back to life again.
So I gave it a good clean up and bought some new ink cartridges for it.
This HP printer, being an HP printer, is well catered for under Linux.
And it's not a difficult matter to plug it into a Linux box and install cups and use the same interface.
Cups are printing same for scanning and you can bring it back to life again but I didn't really want to do that.
What I wanted to do is to turn it into a network printer that could be used by the rest of the family.
My kids are mostly away at university these days but invariably they've got something they want to print when they pass through.
So I thought this would be a good solution to that problem.
At least when they don't need very high quality stuff, I have a colour laser jet as well.
But I tend not to run that quite much because it's quite expensive to run.
So I searched the internet and found an article which I've linked to in a magazine called Raspberry Pi Geek.
And I've been using that as the basis of my investigations to set things up.
So you'll gather from that what I'm doing is using the Raspberry Pi.
I've got an old one which I bought back when they first came out.
It's a model B, the sort that had two USBs on it.
I think it was about 2012 that I bought it.
Certainly I remember putting in my pre-order before they were even available and getting it.
But it's not been used a huge lot.
It's in one of the Pimironi acrylic rainbow cases which I really like because you build them.
Stack bits on top of the other.
There's quite some useful variations on the original case.
So what I've done is I've got the Pi and I've connected it directly to my router with an ethernet cable.
It actually sits where the timer wrote this up.
I've been working on these notes for a while.
I first put it up.
It was on a shelf that I had in the corner of the living room with the router and the Pi sat on there nicely.
I've since rearranged things a little bit and it's on a shelving system that I bought from my kea.
Anyway, it's the printer is underneath the shelf.
It can easily be connected to the Pi with the USB cable.
The printer needs a fair bit of space so you can open the lid.
You can open the scanner tray and you can open the lid to get to the ink and stuff.
It also needs room for the paper tray.
So you need something fairly substantial to sit on.
The Pi is running Razbian and it's off 32GB SD card at class 10 which is overkill probably for this.
But it's what I had.
Before I started this project, I made sure I had the latest version of Razbian on it.
As an aside, because the power supply for this printer seems to consume power even when the printer is off.
It's not physically switched off.
It's just a software control.
I installed one of the radio control switches I use in the house and I turned it on and off with a remote control.
So, I think I bought a set of four of these things.
I've linked to it in case you're interested.
And I use them for various bits of kit around the house to power them on and off from the mains.
The turning on of this printer, which wakes it up, makes it go through self tests and stuff,
is something that totally and utterly fascinates my cat.
And I included a picture of her running across to the printer and sitting there staring.
I had it waiting for something or other to happen.
I'm not sure what she thinks is going on.
Something lives in there probably in her mind.
So when I was setting things up, I configured the pie connected to a monitor keyboard and mouse.
And then I put SSH on it and placed it where in its final location where it's just running headless.
So I can SSH into it.
I normally assign all of my local machines a fixed DHCP address on the router.
And then I add this address to etc hosts on all of my client machines.
This one ended up being called RPI-1.
And it's got an address of all my devices in the 192168.0 range.
And this is 66.
So in the headless mode, I installed cups.
It's pretty simple.
On Raspberry and this brings in many other packages such as the HP LIP, HP Linux Imaging and Printing.
And same, which I'm fascinated to learn stands for scanner access now easy.
Cheesy or what? Wow.
It also brings in many filters and printer drivers.
So cups is really cool.
I know other people have spoken about it and gone in a fair bit of depth.
But I still thought this would be of interest.
People wanting to do the same as I've been doing.
So once cups is installed, it's fairly simple to configure it either through the HP Setup tool or the web interface.
Now, HP Setup is primarily used for setting up HP printers, which interface to the HP LIP software.
And since I was setting up an HP printer, I used the command HP hyphen setup space minus i for this.
And used it to configure a print queue with the HP Cups driver.
If you are doing this with a different sort of printer, then you might be best used the Cups web interface.
But I don't have any direct experience of this for other printers.
The web interface to Cups is quite good.
It's available on port 631.
So I simply point a browser to my Raspberry Pi with an O with an HTTP colon slash slash address.
66 colon, 631.
I'll read it all out in detail.
And there you go.
I have access to the interface.
And there's administrative functions such as managing printers and print jobs.
You need to authenticate the Cups and to use credentials which have the ability to perform printer administration.
So I chose to give my account on the Raspberry Pi, which is Dave, LP admin rights.
And that's simply done with a user mod command, which I've put in the notes.
I'll read it out.
pseudo space user mod space hyphen A, space hyphen capital G, space LP admin space Dave.
So what that's doing is adding to the user account Dave, the group LP admin.
If you look in the Raspberry Pi Geek magazine article, it recommends some further steps steps to make the printer visible.
And this is using the Cups interface.
So you put in, you type in the command pseudo space Cups Ctl,
in large case space hyphen hyphen remote space any.
I think that says any address can access the printer.
And you also need to change a file.
No, you don't.
You also need to restart the Cups service, which they recommend using the init.d startup file.
But I actually used the Raspbian service command, which is a Debian thing, pseudo space service space Cups space restart.
So then using the web interface, I could create Cups printer cues on the Raspberry Pi.
I saved cues in the plural because I tried messing around with with cues with different behaviors.
I don't think that was really necessary.
I haven't gone into detail of what I did there.
So in the magazine article I referred to, there's advice on setting up print lines on remote systems.
I did this on my Debian testing KDE system by invoking system settings and selecting the printer's entry.
So you can just define a printer that way and point it at the remote printer.
My son who was around at the time and has a MacBook did pretty much the same in order to print.
Given that Cups is now an Apple product and is available on OSX, it's not too surprising.
He could do that easily.
I did have a look at getting my Android phone or Nexus 7 tablet to print.
They can both print to my networked HP LaserJet printer, but there's a plugin called HP Print Service,
a free one that allows that.
And I don't think this uses a standard LPR type of connection.
I'm not prepared to pay money to make one of these devices print.
And I've only found non-free Android apps so far to do this.
It's not really a big deal.
I have never wanted to print other than to prove that I could.
At the time of writing, which is now, I've not managed to set up my daughter's Windows 8 PC to use this printer.
I was aware that I could set up Sambo on the Raspberry Pi, which could then be made visible to Windows boxes.
But I was a bit reluctant to do this.
I didn't really want to have Sambo floating about now.
My daughter's actually away at university now, but I recently found some helpful advice on this subject on the Arch Wiki.
In particular, the use of IPP, which is Internet Printing Protocol, which is an HTTP interface to CUPS.
So I've not tested this because I don't have a Windows machine available at the moment.
But when I do, when one of the kids comes by, I've got Windows, I will set that up and test it.
The advice on the Arch Wiki, I was fascinated to see, does not recommend the use of Sambo, which get on board with totally.
So I've put the sort of URL that I would use when I come to test this in the long notes, by the way,
which is the, which references the server, port 631, and then the name of the queue.
So hopefully that will solve that particular problem.
So this printer, as I mentioned before, also has a scanner incorporated into it.
So I reckon that it should be possible to operate the scanner remotely.
According to them, Raspberry Pi Geek magazine, you can do this by making sure the same demon runs all the time.
And in order to do this, you have to edit the file slash ETC slash default slash same D.
As I've put in the notes, I added two lines to this file, which are,
IUN, capital IUN equals yes, lowercase yes, run equals yes, that is.
And run as user, that's capital IUN, underscore capital AS, underscore capital USCR,
equals same D in lowercase S, A, N, E, D.
So I think that means run it all the time and the user's run under is user same D.
It was recommended to edit slash ETC slash sane S, A, N, D, dot D slash S, A, N, E, D, dot conf,
et cetera, sane D, sane D dot conf, to add the line.
And in my case, this was the range of addresses on my local network, local network is 192.168.0.0.
And if you add a slash 24 on the end of that, it means everything from 0 to 255,
that last digit varies from 0 to 255.
So everything that's being served locally by my router, which only covers that range anyway,
is available to, is capable of accessing the scanner.
That was intention.
Then I started the demon on the Raspberry Pi with pseudo space service space sane D,
as I said, A, N, E, D space restart to the service and the user are the same.
And then on the Pi, I tried the following command, which is, these are all in the notes,
of course, pseudo space scan image, S, C, A, N, I, M, A, G, E, lowercase all the way through,
space minus capital L. I think what that's doing is it's looking for all visible scanner devices
on the network. I think I'm not looked into that in great detail, but I think that's what it's
doing. And I get back, I got back a response, which is long so I won't read it,
which begins with device, followed by various details of the device and some text that says
that it's a Hewlett-Packard PSC 2400 series, blah blah blah. So the scanner's visible from the
Raspberry Pi. So next I moved to my desktop machine, which also had cups installed, which is
necessary prerequisite, and used the same command, but didn't find the scanner. So I went back to
the Raspberry Pi and looked at one of the logs, which is slash, vah slash log slash demon.log.
And in it, I saw the Linux desktop machine connecting, it's on 191.68.0.5,
saw it being granted access, and then I got a permission denied message invalid USB
underscore open permission denied. So some things not right on the Raspberry Pi in terms of
permissions, it seems. Took me a while to work out what was happening, but to cut a long story short,
I first of all found the device and you do that as root on the Pi by typing ls usb and various
devices to listen, including the usb infrastructure itself, but the last one I saw was the printer.
And it came back as being on bus 001 device 009. I then did an ls minus l on that device,
which is actually slash dev slash bus slash usb slash 001 slash 009. And what I see saw,
what you can see yourself in my notes. And it was much, was it much that I did this? Anyway,
for a while ago, is that it's owned by user root group LP. It does not entirely, you know,
it makes sense. It's not stupid to talk, because it's it's a printer. So group LP seems like
a reasonable thing to make it owned by. But looking at user sain d to see which groups it's in,
and that use the ID command for that ID space sain d, you get back, it's your ID, it's GID,
and then a list of its groups. It's in the group sain d, which is normal, that things belong to
their own, a group named the same as the user name. And it's in the group scanner, which is 1100.
So that's why user sain d can't access the device. It doesn't have, it's not in the same group,
it's not in the right group. Now various things you could do to fix this. But given that a device
can only be in one group without going to jump through a lot of hoops, then the simplest thing
to do seemed to be to add user sain d to the LP group. So that was done with the user mod command,
I'm root when I'm doing this. And it's the same sort of command that we saw earlier, user mod
space minus low case A, space minus capital G, space LP, space sain d. So user mod ad group LP
to sain d is what that's doing. Then ID, sain d gives back the extended group, which is
sain d is before LP and scanner. So that's achieved what we wanted to do in terms of groups. Now
scan image minus L from the capital L again, from the remote client, returned the device message
saying yes, I see an HP printer. So having done that, it was possible for the remote system
to access the scanner with Gimp. Gimp has a scanner interface. There's a tool called xsain, capital
X, sain e, lower case. And there are various other same tools that would let you get access to
scanners. It's not clear why standard cups create the user sain d in the scanner group,
where the device is owned by the LP group, some sort of logic snafu going on there. There's a
certain element of sensing there that the device is owned by LP, but it also ought to be owned by
scanner. Anyway, I'm not sure if this is a problem with the sain d user itself, or maybe there's
something that the UDev code should be doing when it creates the device. I could mess around with
this. I haven't done so. If you're interested in looking at this type of thing yourself, Klaatu has
done some excellent shows on building your own UDev rules on his podcast Gnu World Order.
In terms of accessing the scanner from macOS X and from windows, I haven't tested these yet.
Nobody's really wanted to do much in the way of scanning from these devices. The old occasion
when they have somebody visited and said, I've got this document, can you scan it? The easiest
thing to do is just scan it onto my Linux box and then share it with them, or indeed print it
if they wanted a copy. The print is actually able to do copies all by itself, so it's not
usual, that's what they want, but they're often like electronic versions, so I just email it to them
or share our drop box or something like that. But this is something I would like to look into
in the future, but I don't have either of these machines to play with, so I need to wait for
suitable visitors to come along and help me to test it out. So that's it. I hopefully you
found it useful if you're thinking of going down this sort of road yourself or you've had problems
solving similar sort of problems to the ones I was looking at. I hope you found it useful anyway.
Okay, bye.
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