You can do the same with IRC and a ksh/Perl script implementing a loop and PING, Gopher, FTP, MUDs, Finger and NNTP servers.
With Plan9/9front everything involving TLS could me made a script and an Acme frontend, except for video.
Bye CUPS: Printing with Netcat
51–60 of 183 posts
Re: Bye CUPS: Printing with Netcat
#52FWIW, the Internet Printing Protocol (and IPP Everywhere in particular) make printer setup in CUPS far, far easier, but distributors seem reluctant to encourage it. I wrote about my experiences with IPP back in June ( https://lwn.net/Articles/857502/ ). I expect to never have to hassle with printer drivers again...
I own a HP MFP and for several years HPLIP generally worked for several to many months at a time, until it didn't. Me and the wiff both run Arch on our laptops (she doesn't know or care).
After a particularly rubbish time trying to get HPLIP working again after a pacman -Syu I did a literature search: Mr CUPS had deprecated everything apart from IPP Everywhere. So, I tried it out.
Me and the missus send docs to print and they get printed. I cannot remember the last failure (apart from running out of paper.) I also have toner levels monitored via Home Assistant.
I also have an office with several MFPs and inkjets, accessed via Windows (Server 2019) print queues. They are not so reliable. I often have to restart the Print Spooler service on our print server. To be fair, it is generally one queue that is at fault.
Re: Bye CUPS: Printing with Netcat
#53FWIW, the Internet Printing Protocol (and IPP Everywhere in particular) make printer setup in CUPS far, far easier, but distributors seem reluctant to encourage it. I wrote about my experiences with IPP back in June ( https://lwn.net/Articles/857502/ ). I expect to never have to hassle with printer drivers again...
keep in mind not every printer has a good http stack, especially if the device never gets restarted this can be a problem.
Probably true but why not turn it off and on again daily. While you are at it, you can restart your print queues regularly via a cronjob or Taskman.
There is no need to suffer if that will do the job.
Pragmatism is not the enemy of perfection.
Re: Bye CUPS: Printing with Netcat
#54Hah. I had a similar moment of enlightenment with FreeBSD when somebody explained that you can just cat a wav file into /dev/audio (or /dev/dsp? forget the exact name). And that you can produce white noise by catting /dev/random to the same destination. With no barrier to the sound card like that, I was free to experiment with programming dfferent noise algorithms and figuring out how digital audio works. I eventuall…
When I was first learning Linux many years ago a friend and I got intoxicated and catted /dev/hda into /dev/dsp. It was all basically static with sometimes very structured patterns that we would try to guess as to what filetype was producing them. He had download and forgotten about a long uncompressed audio recording of a piano performance on his drive that suddenly started breaking through the static in chunks of v…
Good skills.
It has never occurred to me to do that but it is actually quite an obvious thing to do when you "know" that everything is a file.
Any idea what the visual equivalent would be?
Re: Bye CUPS: Printing with Netcat
#55Hah. I had a similar moment of enlightenment with FreeBSD when somebody explained that you can just cat a wav file into /dev/audio (or /dev/dsp? forget the exact name). And that you can produce white noise by catting /dev/random to the same destination. With no barrier to the sound card like that, I was free to experiment with programming dfferent noise algorithms and figuring out how digital audio works. I eventuall…
I remember back when ALSA was a hot new thing on Linux, and it kinda sorta solved the "only one app can play things at the same time" problem that existed with the traditional OSS.
Meanwhile, OSS on FreeBSD just worked.
Re: Bye CUPS: Printing with Netcat
#56Hah. I had a similar moment of enlightenment with FreeBSD when somebody explained that you can just cat a wav file into /dev/audio (or /dev/dsp? forget the exact name). And that you can produce white noise by catting /dev/random to the same destination. With no barrier to the sound card like that, I was free to experiment with programming dfferent noise algorithms and figuring out how digital audio works. I eventuall…
I remember back when ALSA was a hot new thing on Linux, and it kinda sorta solved the "only one app can play things at the same time" problem that existed with the traditional OSS. Meanwhile, OSS on FreeBSD just worked.
Rinse & repeat when every desktop environment brought their own audio daemons, then later PulseAudio and now PipeWire.
I still roll my eyes and I don’t get surprised every couple of years when somebody releases a yet another Linux audio daemon.
Maybe it’s some kind of Linux tradition.
At least PipeWire is saner compared to PulseAudio.
Re: Bye CUPS: Printing with Netcat
#57You can do the same with IRC and a ksh/Perl script implementing a loop and PING, Gopher, FTP, MUDs, Finger and NNTP servers. With Plan9/9front everything involving TLS could me made a script and an Acme frontend, except for video.
KISS Linux taught me this! Once I realized I could read/write to IRC over netcat, I paired that will all the Bash magic KISS taught me and created a pure bash IRC client in 54LoC: https://github.com/retrohacker/irc-sh
Re: Bye CUPS: Printing with Netcat
#58The point of CUPS and of server middleware in general like PulseAudio and what not is when multiple clients all want to send output streams to the same sink. Just sending the stream directly to a device with no middleman works fine provided 1) the stream is encoded in a way the device understands, and 2) no one else is trying to use it at the same time. For a shared network resource like a printer, unless you live al…
Hence the existence of lp(1), which at its simplest is just a queue that sends things to the network as they arrive.
Re: Bye CUPS: Printing with Netcat
#59It’s odd that the author does not mention that because this is FreeBSD, the recommended print spooler is the Berkeley line printer daemon, not CUPS. It’s discussed right on the page he linked to.
Re: Bye CUPS: Printing with Netcat
#60Hah. I had a similar moment of enlightenment with FreeBSD when somebody explained that you can just cat a wav file into /dev/audio (or /dev/dsp? forget the exact name). And that you can produce white noise by catting /dev/random to the same destination. With no barrier to the sound card like that, I was free to experiment with programming dfferent noise algorithms and figuring out how digital audio works. I eventuall…
The secret of *nix that people don't like accepting is the file approach is often the right approach. Consider lowly embedded linux. You COULD dig down deep into the documentation of which register, which interrupt, which special memory address needs to be written to interact with the right ports on a embedded linux board. All while adding a bunch of safeguards and checks to make sure "Only you are doing this". Or, a…
I don't think this has anything to do with the file approach per se, just with using an interface at a higher abstraction level.