The situation: back in 2009 or thereabouts, I bought a Samsung CLP-620ND color laser printer because it was buckets cheaper than other color lasers at the time, ran relatively fast, and I figured it being a workgroup-class printer, it would last a long time.

Now, it's 2018, and it's indeed still working fine, given our relatively modest demands of it. I've replaced the toner cartridges three times since the originals, and I'm pleased that the aftermarket still offers them at half the price of Samsung-official cartridges with no observable difference in quality.

Yes it's still working fine, but it's still got the circa 2009 firmware on the inside. This suggests the potential for security nasties, although the printer is (hopefully) not poking around through my firewall. I went digging deep into the Interwebs, and so far as I can tell:

- Samsung is somehow outsourcing support for their printers to HP. If you want to find drivers and such, you're getting them from an HP web site.

- The embedded web server in the printer knows how to install new firmware, if you've got a firmware image handy to upload through the browser, but firmware images are not available anywhere on the web. You can find PC/Mac/Linux drivers, but not firmware.

- Well almost. There are commercial firms in weird places (e.g., Romania) that will sell you hacked firmware that disables Samsung's dumb DRM, so you can refill your own toner cartridges. Most any web site you find that talks about firmware is talking about it in the context of resetting the various DRM counters.

- If I still had the ancient install CD (long gone) there's some kind of tool called SPD (Samsung Printer Diagnostics) that's supposed to have its own firmware downloader/installer. I found some weird Korean Samsung site and I'm trying to download a SPD image. That thing is running at a glacial pace (i.e., an hour to download less than 44MB). I'm not confident the thing I might be downloading is in any way relevant to my printer. UPDATE: once that download finally finished, it triggered the Windows Defender malware detector. Sigh.

- Supposedly, newer Samsung variants on this printer understand how to be a Google Cloud Printer. This would be a seriously valuable feature, so my kid can print to it from her Chromebook. I'm instead using the feature where Chrome on my Mac can be a front-end for the whole Cloud Print thing. This doesn't work well at all. I kinda wonder whether Cloud Print works in any other case.

I'm currently leaning toward "leave well enough alone", but I figured if anywhere there was somewhere I could find useful advice, this is the place.

Re: Google Cloud printing. I have a Samsung M283x, a basic B&W laser, and it will frequently print out a page with "error code 11 1112" rather then what I wanted. Re-printing the same page again will often get a successful print. Go figure.

You could make a Pi do the Google Cloud work instead of your Mac.

I've been getting a page with an error code on it instead of what I printed a few times over the last few months. Only with Office documents (Word and PowerPoint - not Excel oddly enough), it always prints correctly the next time. However, I don't think we use Google Cloud Printing at work.

I had a CLP610-ND that died and seemed unfixable so I gave up on it. Aftermarket cartridges weren't the best I found.

I might have the original disk somewhere if it's likely to be the same or similar but surprised you can't find it anywhere.

I'd leave alone probably and just make sure no ports are open to it. It's probably obscure enough now, that even if there was a hole and someone got in on another device, you'd have a bigger problem with the original device being hacked...

Regarding the cloud print, do you have a NAS or pi something you could run it on?

This was an angle I hadn't considered. The software for this is something I should play with on my home desktop Mac, and then it's independent of whatever's going on with my browser. I smell a weekend project coming on.

I'm definitely leaning toward "leaving well enough alone" with the printer firmware.

EDIT: Google also has a standalone connector.

If you’ve still got an Apple Airport around, could USB printer share it off there as a stop gap before filling in all the other features with your connector project.

Makes me wonder if Samsung and HP made some sort of agreement back then to license some LaserJet tech. Sounds like it if HP support is in the offerings as a form of escalation path, but that’s mostly a guess. Never got much insight into the printer side of the house during my HP years.

Got busy with other stuff this weekend, so didn't get the chance to attack this project, but one of the features of this particular printer is that it has a real Ethernet jack, so I've got it connected to my home network with good old fashioned wires. The printer is fully visible on our WiFi network, so it's easy to print to it from regular laptops. It's just my daughter's Chromebook that I want to support. The current workaround is "mom/dad, can you print this Google Doc I just shared with you?"

I ran into issues with both the instructions at the link I provided above (demon related), and the standalone connector instructions (Go build related).

Googling around brought me to this page on cloudprint-service, which resolved my demon issue. So I did a fresh install of Stretch Lite, CUPS, and grabbed the pxlmono PPD file for my printer.

Agh! I spoke too soon. The service is not restarting after a rreboot. Manually running "sudo systemctl start cloudprintd.service" gets it running. "systemctl status cloudprintd.service" returns:

Code:

● cloudprintd.service - Google Cloud Print proxy service
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/cloudprintd.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: activating (auto-restart) (Result: exit-code) since Sun 2018-02-11 16:24:29 UTC; 3min 36s ago
  Process: 330 ExecStart=/usr/sbin/cloudprintd -a /var/lib/cloudprintd/authfile.json (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)
 Main PID: 330 (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)
   CGroup: /system.slice/cloudprintd.service

Feb 11 16:24:29 cloudprinter systemd[1]: cloudprintd.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.

I'll debug later, for now I need to go play Pete the Cat.

edit Not sure what is happening, but it take about 5 minutes after a reboot for the cloudprint-service to successfully start. I'm declaring victory for now. We'll see how SWMBO and the kids react.