HP Jetdirect...

Here's a little known fact. Those HP laserprinters you have in your network have these Jetdirect network interfaces in em. And if you just dont happen to be running an HP Windows machine, it can be a PITA to configure them. Especially as, in my case, the button on the top of the laserprinter was damaged.

So what do to ? Why not do a ping to your local subnet to the 'broadcast' IP address - typically 255:

WeeBookPro-9:~ Bill$ ping 192.168.0.255

PING 192.168.0.255 (192.168.0.255): 56 data bytes

64 bytes from 192.168.0.31: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.066 ms

64 bytes from 192.168.0.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=1.243 ms (DUP!)

64 bytes from 192.168.0.24: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=6.143 ms (DUP!)

 

Everything on the subnet should respond. Excellent. So we can now figure out the IP address that the printer has taken. In this case, 24. We can then telnet to it:

WeeBookPro-9:~ Bill$ telnet 192.168.0.24

Trying 192.168.0.24...

Connected to 192.168.0.24.

Escape character is '^]'.

HP JetDirect

Password is not set

Please type "menu" for the MENU system, 

or "?" for help, or "/" for current settings.

> menu

   ===JetDirect Telnet Configuration===

   HP JetDirect     : J4169A

   Firmware Version : L.21.22

   Manufacturing ID : 21214202902121

   Hardware Address : 00:01:E6:5F:F5:1B

   System Up Time   : 0:13:57 

                 MAIN MENU

  ----------------------------------------

  1. General Settings

  2. TCP/IP Menu

  3. SNMP Menu

  4. IPX/SPX Settings

  5. AppleTalk Settings

  6. DLC/LLC Settings

  7. Other Settings

  8. Support Settings

  9. Help

  0. Exit  Enter Selection => 

And there you have an old-fashioned, ASCII set up page. Fantastic. My accountant can now sit in my home office and print out the accounts.

Extra points if you can actually remember what SPX was about. Hint: There was a cient/server version of cc:Mail that used SPX but never saw the light of day. 

Comments

[Chris Linfoot]

Why not do a ping to your local subnet to the 'broadcast' IP address?

Well, actually because it will usually not work - many (I suspect most) routers silently drop ICMP echo requests to the broadcast address, as the RFC says they may. Probably because pinging the broadcast address with a large packet size and spoofing the source address so that replies go to some innocent bystander is an excellent way of denying service to that innocent bystander - see smurfing here.

[Lars Berntrop-Bos]

@1 facepalm: local subnet =.> no outer involved...

@Bill SPX: Novell networking

[Bill]

Ah - yeah - Chris - within the local subnet, most dumb devices - printers, etc, will quite happily respond to a ping. My mac doesnt, as its properly firewalled, and yes, most routers wont onpass a ping from outside.

But thats okay, because thats not what were trying to do here. I didnt want to bog the reader down into a discussion about firewalling pings.

---* Bill

[Dwight Wilbanks]

Wow was I excited to see your post, and disappointed when I tried it myself.

Looks like its a unix only thing, next time I end up plugging my mac in, or bring up another linux machine, I'll give it a try again, but from XP, 2K3 & W7 on my network, none of them reply back.

Since I always have Ultraedit available (Column mode is awsome) I just create a batch file that does it for me.

Example: http://www.stealthpartner.com/pingall.txt

[Bill]

I suspect your local windows firewall is restricting things here.

---* Bill