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After playing around with it. I think that what is causing this to happen is that the JetDirect port on the printer (usually 9100) is getting written to by a p
by cantankerous 14y ago
After playing around with it. I think that what is causing this to happen is that the JetDirect port on the printer (usually 9100) is getting written to by a port scanner. This will cause a printer using JetDirect to print out whatever gets sent to it on that port. Try it yourself if you have a printer that implements it. For me it was a Brother HD-5370DW.
1. telnet <printer> 9100
2. Type a hello world message.
3. Close the connection
4. The printer will print out whatever you typed. At least it did for me.
- da_n 14y agoCan confirm this works on my Epson printer (SX535WD).
- brokenparser 14y ago@PJL RDYMSG DISPLAY="Tray 1 Load Plain Letter" Confuses the heck out of your coworkers.
- eli 14y agoA while back I hacked a cronjob to update mine with the current weather forecast.
- eli 14y agoIn fact, it's here http://www.elidickinson.com/story/weather-updates-your-hp-printer-lcd-display http://www.elidickinson.com/story/weather-updates-your-hp-pr... I think it was the first python script I wrote.
- b_emery 14y agoWow, this works on my HP printer. That would explain the reams of pages I get that look like this: GET http://www.baidu.com/ http://www.baidu.com/ HTTP/1.1 Host: www.baidu.com Accept: / Pragma: no-cache User-Agent:
- a_bonobo 14y agoI sometimes get the same ones at work! It's the crawler from the Baidu-search-engine checking if the printer is a web-server. I contacted ITS about it (obviously, you shouldn't be able to print from outside the university) but they haven't really given it any work. It surely is a security hole, and a minor waste of ink & paper.
- tedunangst 14y agoActually, it's somebody searching for an open proxy, note the inclusion of http and hostname in the GET. The baidu crawler wouldn't be so ridiculous as to request its own homepage from your server. Somebody is testing to see if they can get your server to proxy to baidu for them.
- a_bonobo 14y agoBut why so often then? Surely at some point you'd know there's an open port there and stop querying it.
- tedunangst 14y agoSurely at some point these same people would realize there's no admin.php on my web server, but there they are, still looking for it...
- k6b 14y agobecause they are automated bots...
- b_emery 14y agoI get several pages printed per day, some with other sites listed. Very happy to be enlightened about the source!