stop hotplug from detecting things connected to usb (but still noticing usb itself)
 

i have a psc2110xi printer, and it is kind of a nuisance for my family to have problems turning the printer on before starting the computer and it screwing up printing

it seems that when hotplug detects the printer, it does some funny insmodding and config changing and then i cannot print

is it possible to keep hotplug on and still allow it to notice the usb hubs and ports themselves without making it recognize things attached to them?


*note: the printer works fine through cups when i turn it on after slackware is loaded

also, i've tried putting "printer" (the module being loaded that screws things up) in /etc/hotplug/blacklist, but hotplug still sees the printer and does something weird; i want to stop this

Unfortunately, the answer is "mostly" No.

You could most likely make some low-level changes (the likes of which I wouldn't know) but what you're basically asking USB to do is not act like USB. One of the primary purposes of USB is to allow all daisy-chained devices to act as if they are not daisy chained: Having a hub makes no difference to your USB controller, for example.

What would be much easier to fix is: figure out why you're having problems on boot-up with the printer.

when it loads the module printer and it screws things up, can you fix it by unloading the module?
rmmod printer

If this helps, you could add this to your /etc/rc.d/rc.local.

ya, i guess i probably was asking too much
the problem was not really the module, but what hotplug was doing to the system links or whatnot, and that is something cups did not like

anyway, i seem to have solved my problem (although it doesn't seem as though anything has truly changed when i bootup)
i figured that i really don't ever want automatic modprobing done for anything i attach to my usb devices and that i could simply do some modprobing manually or through rc.localhost to setup usb, but i do like hotplug's automatic pci modprobing
thus i decided to alter rc.hotplug and changed all the places that said *.rc to pci.rc so that it would hopefully only do pci stuff and avoid usb.rc

i reboot after making these changes (with my printer on) but to my dismay, i still saw automatic usb modprobing done and saw that it recognized the printer (which was exactly what i did not want it to do) but it skipped a step that was done before

i go into gnome and try to print... amazingly it worked (i tried with my printer off at bootup and it worked as well)

although everything is fine now with my printer, just a curiosity, why is hotplug still doing usb modprobing when i specifically told it to only do pci scripts? is there another file that hotplug looks to to tell it to do things?

Are you sure that it isn't the kernel itself doing the probing?

If everything works perfectly now, though, that's the important part. :)

hmm, never thought of that, but ya i guess i should have thought of something like that happening

i guess i'll find out if it really is the kernel when i compile the upcoming 2.6.0 kernel (i see no need to compile now)