Topics from the Open Printing microconference

Posted Sep 12, 2019 7:29 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
In reply to: Topics from the Open Printing microconference by pabs
Parent article: Topics from the Open Printing microconference

A printer has not been a device since networking happened. It's been a long time to come, but even consumer printers come with wi-fi nowadays.

fwupd/LVFS is not set up to update remote hosts (not to mention, that any manufacturer serious about security, won't let any random host on the network change the device firmware without some form of auth).

Topics from the Open Printing microconference

Posted Sep 12, 2019 7:46 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (3 responses)

Though, of course, in our brave new world of appliances and connected lightbulbs, if would be incredibly valuable to manage the standardization of a remote firmware update API, first for Linux desktops and servers, second for Linux appliances, third for other applicances.

One could use a single laptop to discover and push firmware updates to all the networked things on the home network, without needing to log in every single proprietary management console or app (once the laptop got the auth tokens for everything update-able).

But, I sort of doubt the fwupd/LVFS guys want to take this up now. The freedesktop community is barely coming to terms of Linux systems as network clients by default, they still have a long way to go before they start thinking of them as mini servers by default too.

And besides, a lot of appliance manufacturers, are starting to weaponize the proprietary management apps, to tie devices to their cloud, and transform customers into captive subscription cash cows. So many of them won’t agree to generic firmware mecanisms.

Topics from the Open Printing microconference

Posted Sep 12, 2019 8:33 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

> Though, of course, in our brave new world of appliances and connected lightbulbs, if would be incredibly valuable to manage the standardization of a remote firmware update API, first for Linux desktops and servers, second for Linux appliances, third for other applicances.
As it happens, well-designed lightbulbs (and by that I mean ZWave and ZigBee based ones) already have a standardized OTA firmware upgrade protocols.

Topics from the Open Printing microconference

Posted Sep 12, 2019 12:28 UTC (Thu) by Tov (subscriber, #61080) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah, but good luck getting the bulbs updated when using a bridge and app from a different vendor...

Topics from the Open Printing microconference

Posted Sep 12, 2019 18:10 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

It works perfectly fine. The OTA protocol is completely vendor-agnostic.

For example, I have Halo fire alarms that are using ZigBee. The company that produced them no longer exists, but I have several spares. I've recently installed a new one to replace an alarm that was damaged by contractors, and its firmware got updated automatically by my hub.

Topics from the Open Printing microconference

Posted Sep 13, 2019 2:06 UTC (Fri) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (2 responses)

What do you mean by "device"? A printer is a device by any definition of the word that I can think of.

Topics from the Open Printing microconference

Posted Sep 13, 2019 7:17 UTC (Fri) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm pretty sure nim-nim meant that a printer is not a device that you plug in to your computer and that is then controlled by this computer but really it's own computer that's attached to the network and communicates as an equal.

Topics from the Open Printing microconference

Posted Sep 13, 2019 16:07 UTC (Fri) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

Yes, that's exactly what I meant.

Networking has become cheap and reliable enough, including consumer-side via wifi, that printers, and a lot of other things that used to be devices, are graduating to appliances (and a lot of things that never were devices are graduating to appliances too).

That completely changes the landscape, because:
– appliances are autonomous, and do not need a computer to be driven (they can be managed via dumb buttons, cloud connexion, smartphones, alexa, etc)
– the network is shared by many networked things (some definitely not trusted)
– many clients can talk to the appliance in parallel, it's no longer a master-slave 1:1 relationship

That means that instead of designing custom serial, parallel, or whatever protocols, people need to design networking APIs, with strong auth and encryption, and multi-client handling.

The mental and trust model is not the same, and of course people will try to emulate the old device model over networks as long as possible, but mid term it's deader than dead.

And, we'll soon see a replay of the bad old protocol wars, this time network API side.