2.1.5 -> 2.2 Printer is not working

phil.davis

It's a whole new version of FreeBSD under the hood of pfSense 2.2. Driver things that you used in the previous pfSense were for FreeBSD 8.3 - so they would have survived and still run as pfSense version incremented but FreeBSD stayed similar enough.

As you are hopefully aware, there is no support for doing that stuff on your firewall. If want to do it then you will need to find the corresponding drivers/libraries/packages… for FreeBSD 10.1 and put that on your system, like I suppose you must have done some time back to get it going on the previous pfSense.

w0w

Driver things?
ULPT is not some old and crappy just some printer driver, this driver provides support for USB printers that follow the printer
bi- or uni-directional protocol. I mean any printer with USB connection should work using this driver at least at base functionality like receive and send data.
ulpt driver was embedded into freebsd for the years, not 8.3 only, but 10.1 according to this man
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ulpt&sektion=4

I think pfsense just compiled this time without ulpt driver for some reason. I can add ulpt.ko now to check if it's working, but i don't understand why it's not compiled this time.

w0w

Ok, I have downloaded and configured to load ulpt.ko from 10.0 release. Printer is now detected. Updated CUPS, CUPS is running, but not printing, this should be CUPS issue that not this thread problem.
I request to include the ulpt back into pfsense kernel if it possible.

KOM

I can't remember too many times when I need a printer attached to my firewall.

w0w

Is there any reason not to do it? :)

kejianshi

I'm not sure if running a samba share there is a security issue or not. I'd have to let people test it to death.

heper

@kejianshi:

I'm not sure if running a samba share there is a security issue or not. I'd have to let people test it to death.

everything you add to a firewall is a potential additional attack target where you'd need to keep up with the security advisories /updates / ….
every addon package pfsense has a risk of being less secure then a "stock" bsd release.

charliem

@kejianshi:

I'm not sure if running a samba share there is a security issue or not. I'd have to let people test it to death.

Samba? Not sure what that has to do with CUPS. I agree it's poor form to 'accessorize' your firewall, but not everyone has the luxury of that, or some may prefer to learn from personal experience.

The question of including the ulpt module has come up before: https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=78498.msg428605#msg428605 but I guess it never went any further. Including it as a loadable module would seem to be a pretty low risk.

w0w

I don't see any risks if ulpt is compiled into kernel also, I don't ask you to compile CUPS or samba-tumba into kernel. What risks could be caused by ulpt, theoretically? If you don't connect any printer it is not executing any code. Including module instead of compiling into, would be great also for paranoids. ;D

w0w

https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/4108

cmb

@w0w:

https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/4108

No. It's a firewall, not a print server.

w0w

I did not asked you to compile a print server into pfsense is not it? :) And a print server is not the same as usb printer driver support, not even close.
If you just will add ulpt.ko module into pfsense distribution, this is not changing the main concept and do not adding any security holes if firewall user itself don't bring them up. But as I answered on bug tracker… No means no.