Interactive Port

[perryh at pluto.rain.com]

Rem P Roberti <remegius at comcast.net> wrote:

> Brother!  Muttprint is now working fine.  The problem: the printer
> was offline!  Now, before you go accusing me of being a complete
> dufus, let me say that I had no way of knowing that that condition
> existed.  The printer itself indicated that it was online---no
> problem.  What happened is that somehow, and I'm not sure what
> caused this, the printer became disengaged from its usb port.

I'd call it a bug in the printer that it continues to indicate
online when it has lost its connection to its host (unless it
also has a network connection, and in that case I imagine you'd
be using the network instead of USB).

> ...  The only way that I could get it talking again to usb was by
> doing a reboot.

Now _that_ sounds like a possible bug in the USB subsystem, since
USB is supposed to be completely hot-pluggable and should not need
a reboot to get itself straightened out after a mishap.  Cc-ing usb@
list.

One question which will surely arise is, which FreeBSD version are
you using?  The USB stack was completely rewritten in 8.0.