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Comment by freeone3000 | Hacker News Reader

It's getting to the point where a sane mitigation would be to spin up a Windows 10 instance in Hyper-V, running the print spooler and driver in that, and using USB/ethernet passthrough!

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Some might react and say "just move to Linux (even only the servers!)" and while I'll say NeXT/Apple's design of CUPS is great, it's harder to get a good Linux printer driver that's designed for business use (HPLIP is... painful, and I'm pretty sure that's out of most support contracts).

De-install HPLIP and use "IPP Everywhere" if you can. Since I've done that I've had reliable printing that doesn't break on package updates. Given that I use Arch, that was an occasional surprise finale to an update session. It usually started with my SO having an urgent print job to do.

Also, put your preferred paper size in /etc/papersize if you are not letter size inclined.

xerox color machines with fiery controllers aren't that well working with ipp, the last time I worked with them (3 years ago) it crashed pretty often, which meant a full reboot was needed which takes like 5+ minutes on these which was not possible. lpd is still super simple and works super well on these machines, even when using non standard ports

The trouble with LPD is there is no support for authentication, authorisation or encryption.

We all have anecdotes with regards printers 8) I think that nmap still refuses to pound away at the JetDirect port ...

... OK I've just tested that against my home HP MFP and 9100/tcp shows in the results.

If lpd does it for you on Xerox printers, then fine: use that. I was discussing HPLIP ie getting rid of a Hewlett Packard thing!

Why even running a Windows 10 instance in that case? Esp. if it's for backward compat with old crap; run a Win 2k, it will be lighter. And only marginally less maintained, which does not even matter if you isolate like that anyway.

But could you obtain it legally though?

It wasn't hugely advertised, but Win 7 had something called "XP Mode" where it would literally start windows XP in a VM completely in the background, and any program you wanted to start would actually run inside that VM, with windows drawing the application window like a native Win 7 app. It was magical in how well that worked. And yeah, MS just provided a special XP image for this, you didn't need a separate licence for it.

You could request Windows 2000 if you are: Volume License consumer (through downgrade) or Visual Studio subscriber (not for commercial use)

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