Sharing my printer — an HP Color LaserJet 1600 — through my FreeNAS home server is an exercise in futility. There were two methods to try including:
- Method 1: passing the printer to a Windows Server 2012 R2 install sitting in phpVirtualBox
- Method 2: through CUPS
Method 1
I got the printer recognized in VirtualBox using this guide but it wasn’t recognized in the Windows Server 2012 R2 Device Manager whatsoever. There were allusions to VirtualBox not recognizing USB 2.0 devices but even when I forced it to
Method 2
Installing CUPS was not as straight forward as I thought it would be. I followed a couple of guides and in the end I was able to get CUPS to recognize the printer and share it out but unfortunately I was unable to get the driver installed to enable printing itself.
What now?
Thankfully this printer isn’t critical. The print quality deteriorated to the point where it’s no longer suitable for legitimate work. This means I have all the time in the world to get this working and at this point I might just wait for the next version of FreeNAS that will include Bhyve, FreeBSD’s hypervisor. Hopefully that will sort out all these issues and the printer will just work.
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I started Uncharted 4. I’m finding myself feeling old when playing it because of how much this instalment evolved compared to its predecessors.
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