Lukas Beeler's IT Blog

Zebra manufactures label printers. While they do have their own print servers, i’ve seen many deployments where non-Zebra print servers where used. These printers are usually attached to a System i by using a remote outq and a print server.

The difficulty now comes when you have to update their firmware – of course you could just go and plug it into a PC with an old IEEE1284 port, but that might not be very convenient because laptops no longer have them, USB attachment has it’s own set of associated problems, and one might not want to walk to every printer just to upgrade the firmware.

Zebra’s printservers have integrated abilities to upgrade the firmware, and they even have tools to do this job for you. But in this special case, i had to look for my own solution.

As the instructions for a local update, which consisted of sending the file to LPT1:, seemed pretty straightforward, i got my hand on some Unix-tools.

Netcat is available for Windows. You can use it to upgrade the firmware remotely by using a simply trick. Copy nc.exe to C:\windows\system32, extract the firmware to a directory, and then just run the following commandline:

nc 192.168.1.50 9100 < firmware.ext

Note that nc doesn’t exist even after the firmware was flashed successfully, you’ll have to exit it by using CTRL-C.