Monday, April 21, 2014

The kind of support we've come to expect from HP, with Heartbleed bonus points

So, I'm trying to scan a couple of photos to my Mac. My HP 8600 provides a webpage that shows me the features on my multifunction printer/scanner/fax.


When I click on Start Scan, I'm brought to this page with this message
You cannot use this function because it has been disabled. For more information, contact your network administrator or the person who set up the printer.
The ever-helpful user guide offers this guidance:

If you are unable to open Webscan in the EWS, it might be turned off by
your network administrator. For more information, contact your network
administrator or the person who set up your network.
Nowhere in the manual does it tell the afflicted network administrator of this home-office setup what said administrator should do to remedy this situation.
Bonus
After a bit of searching via Google, I learned that the network administrator must go to the Administrator settings page and enable Webscan.
Double-Bonus
To get to the Administrator settings, you must open a secure page that is not secure. They even tell you that this will happen.
If you click on OK and if you've turned on certificate checking, as you should, you'll see this message:

Using the Google Chrome browser, if you use https everywhere, as you should, you'll get this message:

This site's security certificate is not trusted!

This is not quite reassuring in the days after Heartbleed. HP has issued a bulletin regarding Heartbleed's effects on some of its printer products, but nothing yet about the HP 8600.

No comments:

Blog Archive