Last night I started working on an interesting project. In the 80's movie Sneakers there is a scene at the Playtronics Toy Corporation headquarters where someone swipes their card (yes, it is a mag stripe!) through a card reader, and the camera zooms in on a Dot Matrix printer that prints a line recording the transaction directly to paper. I've always wanted to do that and so finally had an opportunity to look into it. I picked up a couple of Oki Microline 420 dot matrix printers on eBay for a song, and there is nothing wrong with them - in fact, they're actually pretty nice printers as far as the Dot Matrix models I've worked with over the course of my life.
The trouble started with the print server I bought off of eBay also. It came without any details, and turned out to be set to a static IP address and had a password set. It turns out this little guy does not have a physical reset button. I even pulled the cover apart to look for any signs of an obvious "reset pin" inside - nothing leaped out at me. Some posts online suggested using the username of psadmin and the password SYSxxxx where xxxx is the last four characters of the device's MAC address in caps. I tried every combination of case, along with a variety of usernames (admin, psadmin, user, manager, system, etc.) - all with no luck. Then I stumbled across another web site that suggested a URL on the device that bypassed the question altogether and allowed me to either reset (reboot) the device or factory reset it. I chose the latter, and a few moments later, it was fully factory reset. For the life of me I cannot find that site on Google right now, but I will check again when I am in front of the computer that I actually retrieved it from. In any case, I was then able to configure the print server and could print test pages from it to each of the various dot matrix printers I have, but getting it to print lines of text at a time from any Linux computer over the network took some more twiddling.
In the end I came up with a way of using lp to accomplish what I wanted to, and the only downside was that each line it printed created a separate "print job" that went through the cups spooler, but apart from what appeared to be some bloat, it did in fact print my lines. Now to get Venturii to produce those lines of event log text for the printer to encode on paper!
