Info and questions about Brother[tm] multifunction machine

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

So, um, I just came into possession of a brand spankin' new Brother
MFC-7860DW all-in-one multifunction machine, and 'me having some fun
exploring it.

Unlike the multifunction machine this is replacing (which had only an
old centronics/parallel port and a USB port) this new Brother machine
has only USB and Ethernet ports.  (Well, um, it apparently can be spoken
to wirelessly, via 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, also, but I'm studiously ignoring that.)

Anyway, I needed to hook this thing to a single Windows 2000 machine and
a single FreeBSD (8.x) machine.  I couldn't immediately figure out how
to make FreeBSD talk to it over ethernet so I just used the USB port for
that connection, and (fortunately) the supplied software that came with
the machine allows Windows 2000 to talk to the thing over the ethernet
connection.  I've run simple printing tests and this setup is all working
just dandy, for both plain text and Postscript.

One thing that I learned is that (contrary to the setup instructions) when
you first wire the thing up to your ethernet hub/router/whatever, you have
to power cycle the Brother machine in order to get it to initiate DHCP and
pull an IP address for itself (and other stuff) from your router.  (I have
a nice old reliable Linksys WRT54g and this worked fine with no problem.)

But like any new high-tech toy, I can't help being curious about the thing,
so I ran a TCP port scan and here's what I came up with:

25
23
21
80
515
631
9100
54921
54922
54923

Very interesting!  I'm damn glad the thing is behind a nat box, elsewise I
can well imagine all sorts of mischief that outsiders could get into with
this thing.

I wasn't familiar with any of the ports above 80, so I had to look those
up.

Port 515 is apparently implementing the "LPR" protocol described in RFC 1179.
There is apparently some info available on using this with FreeBSD here:

  http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/corp-net-guide/printserving-lpr-freebsd.html

and when I get a bit more un-lazy I'll delve into that more deeply.

Port 631 apparently implements "IPP" (Internet Printing Protocol) which is
summarized here:

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Printing_Protocol

and which apparently has a bleep-load of relevant RFCs.  It also appears to
me (from some quick googling) that the CUPS printing system can speak IPP.

Regarding port 9100, my local /etc/services file says:

   jetdirect       9100/tcp   #HP JetDirect card

so I guess that Brother has probably implemeted an emulation of an HP JetDirect
thingy on port 9100.

The 5492x ports are all an enigma to me.  If anybody knows what those are
for, please let me know.

Port 80 is running a web server, and this thing can be configured with a
web browser via that port.  (This seems to be the way that EVERYTHING is
going these days.)

Port 25 is apparently implementing _something_ that sort-of vaguely acts
like an SMTP server.  However it appears to me that it only accepts e-mail
for one very specific email address, <... at example.com>, where the '...'
part is actually a long (unique?) string of letter and numbers that I found
on one of the config printout pages that I generated when I was installing
this thing.  I have no idea what this is all about.  I successfully sent
a short test e-mail to that address, manually typing in all of the necessary
SMTP commands (via telnet to port 25) and nothing whatsoever happened.  I had
kind-of been expecting that what I sent (via SMTP) would be printed, but it
just didn't happen.  Maybe I need to sent it a MIME-encoded message instead (?)

It was pretty much the same story for port 23 (telnet).  I telnetted to it and
it answered/connected, but then it didn't print anything at all... no banner,
no greeting, no prompt, nothing.  So then I typed some gibberish (which didn't
echo, BTW) and then exited telnet and I expected what I had typed to print but
nothing happened.

Port 21 (ftp) was a nice surprise however.  Apparently you can FTP to this
multifunction machine, log in as "anonymous" and then whatever files you PUT
to the thing get printed.  This apparently works for both plain text and
Postscript.

That's all.  I just wanted to share all this info in case it might be useful
to anyone.  But I'm also curious still about those 5492x ports, and the
functionality (if any) that is being implemented on ports 25 and 23.  If
anybody happens to know about that stuff, let me know.

Oh!  And also one last question:  Other than CUPS (which I don't particularly
like very much) are there any low-level tools that are available on FreeBSD
and that speak the LPR protocol or the IPP protocol or the JetDirect protocol?
(I don't really NEED that, since my current setup allows me to do everything
I need to do already, but I'd sort-of like to get my FreeBSD box talking to
this new machine via the ethernet connection, you know, just on principal.)



Regards,
rfg