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From: razzell@cs.ubc.ca (Dan Razzell)
Newsgroups: comp.periphs.printers,comp.sys.sun.admin,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: HP JetDirect (2552A): Serious LPD bug
Date: 6 Mar 1997 21:48:34 GMT
Organization: University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada
Lines: 39
Distribution: inet
Message-ID: <5fne3i$t8l@nnrp.cs.ubc.ca>
References: <5f0ou4$luc@chronicle.concentric.net> <5fa721$2j8@uriah.heep.sax.de>
NNTP-Posting-Host: dosequis.cs.ubc.ca
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.periphs.printers:60762 comp.sys.sun.admin:83074 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:36691
In article <5fa721$2j8@uriah.heep.sax.de>,
j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) writes:
> Alas, while it's very easy to get new firmware, put it into your
> /tftpboot directory etc., it turned out to be absolutely impossible to
> actually _upgrade_ such a beast.
> ...
> I'm still looking for some of this software that actually does what
> it's intended to do... Or better yet, if somebody can tell me which
> SNMP commands i gotta send to this JetDirect, i'd rather love to do it
> all by hand. I'm sure i would be able to do this in much less of the
> time i've already wasted.
[The following comments refer Download Manager A.02.17 for Solaris 2.5.1.]
I see slightly different problems with my current attempts to download,
but share your sentiments about the software. For the simple task it
needs to do, this stuff is hugely overelaborate, and a clumsy mess to
install. I've found all sorts of trivial but annoying problems even
during the installation phase, which hardly creates confidence in the
actual product, and casts a great big cloud of doubt over any sort of
problem diagnosis.
There are a few security problems as well that people might want to
note. Virtually all the installed files have inappropriate permissions.
There are several setuid root shell scripts, not to mention setuid
root text files, and the TFTP directories are world writable.
I too would like to see less effort put into cosmetics that obscure function
and more into explicit, modular behavior that we can configure to suit our
environment. I don't mean to single out Hewlett Packard for criticism here
either. It seems every software system with a GUI suffers from this same
misguided poverty of design.
--
.^.^. Dan Razzell <razzell@cs.ubc.ca>
. o o . Laboratory for Computational Intelligence
. >v< . University of British Columbia
_____mm.mm_____ http://www.cs.ubc.ca/nest/lci