Hi all,

I recently received a imager (photo printer) from a customer, its operating system is a custom redhat linux, apart from needing repair the customer has asked that it be modified in some way to accept non OEM paper cartridges, the unit has (would you believe) three bar code scanners built in, they scan the paper cartridges to make sure they are their own, and not some (cheaper) third part ones, when it has used the number of pages specified by the bar code it will no longer accept that cartridge (so no chance of filling the cartridge with cheaper paper).
It seems I have full admin access to the unit, witch surprised me (password in manual) , and I assume the bar code numbers are logged some where on the hard disk, I wondered about deleting the entries for the cartridge as soon as its used up and thereby doing the refill trick...
My knowledge of Linux is pretty basic, I wondered if anyone would have any ideas or strategies for finding this log file or even if this is worth trying?

Any advise would be great, thanks.

This is a tall order. You basically have to "reverse engineer" the SW that reads the bar codes and makes decisions.

You might get lucky and find that this was done in scripts, but if it's compiled SW, it will mean some long nights.

Maybe you could make bar-code stickers to put on the 3rd-party cartridges?

How much is customer paying you compared to cost savings by using 3rd party carts?

Hi pixellany,

Thanks for the reply, the re-label idea is a good one but all the bar codes would have to be different and I don't know if they use a sequential labeling system on the cartridges.

I was wondering, is there a linux command for searching for strings (the bar code number)?, it would have to search all the files on the system, I thought I could maybe find the log file that way.

Another idea I was given was to insert a cartridge, then use find and the cnewer argument....

The thing is though it might even log the info onto a flash chip somewhere.... thats what I would do if I wanted things to be really safe....