After losing a fair bit of hair due to quality and reliability issues
with our home laser multifunctional (
Brother
DCP1600-series,
which we bought after checking it was meant to work on Linux And it
does, but with a very buggy, proprietary driver Besides being the
printer itself of quite low quality), we decided it was time to survey
the market again, and get a color inkjet printer. I was not very much
an enthusiast of the idea, until I found all of the major
manufacturers now offer refillable ink tanks instead of the darn
expensive cartridges of past decades. Lets see how it goes!
Of course, with over 20 years of training, I did my homework. I was
about to buy an Epson printer, but decided for an
HP Ink Tank 410
Wireless
printer. The day it arrived, not wanting to fuss around too much to
get to see the results, I connected it to my computer using the USB
cable. Everything ran smoothly and happily! No driver hunting needed,
print quality is superb I hope, years from now, we stay with this
impression.
Next day, I tried to print over WiFi. Of course, it requires
configuration. And, of course, configuration
strongly wants you to
do it from a Windows or MacOS machine which I don t have. OK, fall
back to Android For which an app download is required (and does not
thrill me, but what can I say. Oh and the app needs
location
services to even run. Why Maybe because it interacts with the
wireless network in
WiFi Direct, non-authenticated way?)
Anyway, things seem to work. But they don t My computers can
identify and connect with the printer from CUPS, but nothing ever
comes out.
Printer paused, they say. Entering the printer s web
interface is somewhat ambiguous Following the old HP practices, I
tried
http://192.168.1.75:9100/ (no point in hiding my internal IP),
and got a partial webpage sometimes (and nothing at all
othertimes). Seeing the printer got detected over
ipps://, my
immediate reaction was to try pointing the browser to port 631. Seems
to work! Got some odd messages But it seems I ll soon debug the
issue away. I am not a familiar meddler in the dark lands of
cups,
our faithful print server, but I had to remember my toolkit..
# cupsenable HP_Ink_Tank_Wireless_410_series_C37468_ --release
Sucess in enabling, but self-auto-disabled right away
lpstat -t
was not more generous, reporting only it was still paused.
Some hours later (mix in attending kids and whatnot), I finally
remember to try
cupsctl --debug-logging, and magically,
/var/log/cups/error_log turns from being quiet to being quite
chatty. And, of course, my first print job starts being processed:
D [10/May/2020:23:07:20 -0500] Report: jobs-active=1
(...)
D [10/May/2020:23:07:25 -0500] [Job 174] Start rendering...
(...)
D [10/May/2020:23:07:25 -0500] [Job 174] STATE: -connecting-to-device
(...)
Everything looks fine and dandy so far! But, hey, given nothing came
out of the printer keep reading one more second of logs (a couple
dozen lines)
D [10/May/2020:23:07:26 -0500] [Job 174] Connection is encrypted.
D [10/May/2020:23:07:26 -0500] [Job 174] Credentials are expired (Credentials have expired.)
D [10/May/2020:23:07:26 -0500] [Job 174] Printer credentials: HPC37468 / Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT / 28A59EF511A480A34798B6712DEEAE74
D [10/May/2020:23:07:26 -0500] [Job 174] No stored credentials.
D [10/May/2020:23:07:26 -0500] [Job 174] update_reasons(attr=0(), s=\"-cups-pki-invalid,cups-pki-changed,cups-pki-expired,cups-pki-unknown\")
D [10/May/2020:23:07:26 -0500] [Job 174] STATE: -cups-pki-expired
(...)
D [10/May/2020:23:08:00 -0500] [Job 174] envp[16]="CUPS_ENCRYPTION=IfRequested"
(...)
D [10/May/2020:23:08:00 -0500] [Job 174] envp[27]="PRINTER_STATE_REASONS=cups-pki-expired"
My first stabs were attempts to get CUPS not to care about expired
certificates, but it seems to have been hidden or removed from its
usual place. Anyway, I was already frustrated.
WTF Well, yes, turns out that from the Web interface, I paid some
attention to this the first time around, but let it pass (speaks
wonders about my security practices!):
So, the
self-signed certificate the printer issued at itself expired
116 years before even being issued. (is this maybe a Y2k38 bug?
Sounds like it!) Interesting thing, my CUPS log mentions the printer
credentials to expire at the beginning of the Unix Epoch
(
01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT).
OK, lets clickety-click away on the Web interface Didn t take me
long to get to
Network Advanced settings Certificates:
However, clicking on
Configure leads me to the not very
reassuring
I don t remember what I did for the next couple of minutes. Kept
fuming Until I parsed again the output of
lpstat -t, and found
that:
# lpstat -t
(...)
device for HP_Ink_Tank_Wireless_410_series_C37468_: ipps://HPF43909C37468.local:443/ipp/print
(...)
Hmmmm CUPS is connecting using good ol port 443, as if it were a
Web thingy What if I do the same?
Click on New self-signed certificate , click on
Next, a couple of
reloads And a very nice color print came out of the printer, yay!
Now, it still baffles me (of course I checked!): The self-signed
certificate is now said to come from
Issuer : CN=HPC37468, L=Vancouver, ST=Washington, C=US, O=HP,OU=HP-IPG,
alright not that it matters (I can import a more meaningful one if I really feel like
it), but, why is it
Issued On: 2019-06-14 and set to
Expires On: 2029-06-11?
Anyway, print quality is quite nice. I hope to keep the printer long
enough to rant at the certificate being expired in the future!
Having recently switched from NVIDIA to AMD graphic cards, in particular a RX 5700, I found out that I can get myself a free upgrade to the RX 5700 XT variant without paying one Yen, by simply flashing a compatible 5700 XT BIOS onto the 5700 card. Not that this is something new, a detailed explanation can be found here.
The same article also gives a detailed technical explanation on the difference between the two cards. The 5700 variant has less stream processors (2304 against 2560 in the XT variant), and lower power limits and clock speeds. Other than this they are based on the exact same chip layout (Navi 10), and with the same amount and type of memory 8 GB GDDR6.
Flashing the XT BIOS onto the plain 5700 will not changes the number of stream processors, but power limits and clock speeds are raised to the same level of the 5700 XT, providing approximately a 7% gain without any over-clocking and over-powering, and potentially more by raising voltage etc. Detailed numbers can be found in the linked article above.
The first step in this free upgrade is to identify ones own card correctly, best with device id and subsystem id, and then find the correct BIOS. Lots of BIOS dumps are provided in the BIOS database (link already restricting to 5700 XT BIOS). I used CPU-Z (Windows program) to determine this items, see image on the right (click to enlarge). In my case I got 
Today is graduation at 
And that opens what may be the best venue for mocking Anna: this year, which her a senior and co-captain, the team actually managed to loose a league game (a shocking first in these years) and to drop the final. I presume they anticipated that all we would all talk about around now is 
But on the topic of gratulations and what comes next, this tweet was very sweet:
As was this, which marked another impressive score:
So big thanks from all of us to WashU for being such a superb environment for Anna for those four years, and especially everybody at the 
Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report (+ the first week in May) that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you re interested in Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you.
Debian Games
Playonlinux
Earlier this year, I was supposed to participate to 
At 
Continuing on the path towards 
Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world during April 2020 (
For the foreseeable future I'm working for myself, as a contractor, here in sunny Helsinki, Finland.
My existing contract only requires me to work 1.5-2.0 days a week, meaning my week looks something like this:
...even the SD cards were wet!
The last photo my camera took before it died
Tada! Turns out you can dehydrate hardware too!