Marc Charbonneau’s Blog

Change the status message of a HP LaserJet printer

January 22nd, 2007 by Marc Charbonneau

This is an old trick, but always fun. It’s easy to change the status message on a networked HP printer; just telnet to the printer’s IP address on port 9100, and type the following:

@PJL RDYMSG DISPLAY="YOUR MESSAGE HERE"

Press enter, and you’re done; the new status message will stick around until you change it back, or someone restarts the printer.
Feed Me A Cat
If you want to put some effort into it, maybe make an agent to change the message at a random interval, you can also write an application to accomplish the same thing. See here for an example in C#.

Tags: 2 Comments

2 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Adrian Thompson Jul 18, 2007 at 6:13 am

    Are you able to give a bit more detail about changing the status message of a HP printer. I am not that familiar with computers but would like to give it a go. How do I telnet to the printers IP address on port 9100? thanks

    Adrian

  • 2 Michael May 22, 2008 at 11:53 pm

    As the sole IT guy, I FINALLY managed to weasel some time off out of my boss. So why did I think it would be incredibly funny to change the HP printer status message to “VIRUS LOADED - READY” the night before I leave?