[PLUG] Parallel port with Debian 12

["N. Albert via plug" <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

I've had some problems with Debian 12 for a while, and I'd be interested 
to know if anyone else has experienced a similar issue.

A while back, I was hooking a POS (point of sale, it works fine) printer 
for printing alarm logs, and I intended to connect it to a Debian server 
to send jobs to it, since Linux is more conducive to automation. I 
couldn't use it locally, since it was connected to my one tower server 
without a parallel port. Hardware was your typical friendly OptiPlex 
mini tower. It didn't work, and going through dmesg at the time and 
putzing with various pp drivers and the like, I was seeing some 
parport-related stuff but not everything you'd expect to see on a 
working system, and I couldn't get it working successfully.

Note that I was not using CUPS (which for this, I would consider to be 
unwanted/unneeded printer bloat), so there were theoretically fewer 
things that could go wrong. My plan was to write directly to the 
parallel port device, and even that did not work. From my notes, here 
are some of the oddities I uncovered:

# lspci -v | grep "arallel"
# (No output... there should be though)

# dmesg | grep "parport"
[   17.617561] parport_pc 00:03: reported by Plug and Play ACPI
[   17.617644] parport0: PC-style at 0x378 (0x778), irq 7 
[PCSPP,TRISTATE,EPP]
[  617.160115] lp0: using parport0 (interrupt-driven).
# (Some output from dmesg... but there should be more)

# echo "test" > /dev/lp0 # Succeeds, but does nothing
# echo "test" > /dev/parport0
-bash: echo: write error: Invalid argument

I later had another driver-related issue with Debian 12 not installing 
successfully in HyperV on Server 2008 R2, but the Debian 11 installer 
worked (the issue appears to be purely with the installer). After this, 
I suspected driver regressions in Debian 12 that may have broken the 
parallel port. I reported that driver issue[1] to the Debian team, but 
not my parallel port issues since at the time I didn't feel I had enough 
evidence.

The hardware (OptiPlex 745 MT) should work just fine. At the time, I 
moved the connection to a Windows server on similar hardware (OptiPlex 
980 MT), and unsurprisingly, it works perfectly fine in Windows. 
Unfortunately, I wanted to send jobs to it from a Linux machine, and 
Windows doesn't natively have the ability to run a simple TCP print 
server on port 9100. I couldn't even find any working software for 
Windows that would allow me to simply send jobs to a TCP port and have 
them print, and I don't have much of a Windows development background 
either so I gave up on that approach. I ended up having to set up a 
service user to spool jobs to LPT locally and use smbclient to submit 
print jobs from the original Linux server that needed to print jobs, to 
the Windows server. Clunky, but this actually worked fine:

echo "Hello world 123" | smbclient //$SERVER/$PRINTER -U 
$DOMAIN/$USERNAME%$PASSWORD -c "print -" # worked

Fast forward to recently, I ended up finally disabling NTLM completely 
in Active Directory, and with a few exceptions, everything is working 
fine... except now I can't print to the Windows Server anymore since the 
Linux server isn't domain joined (and I don't want to join it) so it 
can't use Kerberos. It's not working even with exceptions for both hosts 
involved, so I think this is my cue that my original workaround was 
silly from the beginning and I should try to get it working the way I 
wanted to originally, using the parallel port... under Linux. It would 
be a lot simpler, and I wouldn't have to deal with Active Directory either.

It's a bit difficult for me to test, since every other machine I have 
with a parallel port is running either Windows or Windows Server, and 
this server is also doing other things. Before I try downgrading the 
server to Debian 11 to see if that helps, I wanted to see if anyone had 
any datapoints that either support or contradict my experiences thus 
far. Is *anyone* using the parallel port under Debian 12 (or another 
version), on any hardware, with success?

[1] 
https://www.mail-archive.com/debian-bugs-dist%40lists.debian.org/msg2006966.html
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