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[LUG] Finally found a use for a BT Home Hub :-)

 

Hi folks,

At the moment I'm working on a project for Surestart in Torquay providing them with a couple of laptops for the kids to use.

One of the challenges has been trying to work out how to provide a printer to connect to the laptops wirelessly (basically so they can put the printer away from the laptops). I'd thought originally of getting a wireless printer but not having any experience of them with Linux I thought going out and buying one to find it didn't work would be a bit of an expensive mistake.

A wireless USB print server also proved to be a bit pricey.

So in the end I found that it's possible to use a BT Home Hub (either the beige one or the black Home Hub 2.0) as a USB file and print server.

If you leave the Home Hub setup using the original IP configuration (so set to 192.168.1.254) then it is possible to attach a printer to the USB port on the hub, setup your machine to point to the IP 192.168.1.253 and have it connect as an lp type device.

Suffice to say I was chuffed at this. It now means that I can print wirelessly to the printer and make use of a couple of old printers from Freecycle rather than having to go out and buy new printers.

For my next trick, I'm going to see if I can 'upgrade' the firmware on the Home Hub 1.0 to DD-WRT or Open-WRT (I gather it's not possible without hardware modifications on the HomeHub 2.0).

Rob

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