I came across an interesting incident on on our IT service management software (Service-Now) which was a nice change from the usual stuff I come across. The incident was described like this:
“Good afternoon,
Printer xyz is showing the error message ‘Resend Upgrade’. It is a HP Color LaserJet CP4525.
Can you please look into this?”
A quick look on the products support page on the HP website suggested the printer’s firmware needed to be updated.
Normally, something like this would have been passed onto the Desktop Team but I was curious to learn that the firmware could be updated remotely via FTP and wanted to this job to myself. I wanted to take ownership of the task and see it through to resolution myself.
I arranged with the user to put up an ‘out of order’ sign on the printer so no one disturbs it while I’m working on it remotely.
Here’s a look at the firmware version before the update on the printers Web interface:
The instructions on how to update the firmware can be found on the HP’s product support page for the printer. The firmware I downloaded was “20140127 07.160.6”.
Here’s a screenshot of the firmware reflected on the printer’s Web interface after I updated it:
What you will need to update the firmware:
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The IP address of the printer
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The firmware for the printer downloaded from HP
Make sure you download the latest firmware and that it’s for the right product. The firmware file will have a long name with a .rfu extension. Save it in the C: drive and also rename the file to something shorter to make things easier for yourself.
The instructions I used are reproduced below from the HP website. The text formatting options within WordPress is quite poor hence the layout of the instructions below is less than ideal.
1. Open a Command prompt window on your computer
2. Type ftp followed by the IP address of the printer
For example, if the IP address is 192.168.0.90, type ftp 192.168.0.90
3. Press Enter on the keyboard.
4. When prompted for the user name, press Enter
5. When prompted for the password, press Enter
You should now be logged into the printer via FTP
6. Type bin at the command prompt.
7. Press Enter . The following message will appear in the command prompt window:
200 Type set to I, Using binary mode to transfer files
8. Type put followed by the path to the firmware file
For example, type put C:\FIRMWARE.RFU and then press Enter
If the file name or path includes a space, you must enclose the file name or path in quotation marks.
The following series of messages appears in the command window:
200 PORT command successful
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection
226 Ready
226 Processing Job
226 Transfer complete
After these messages appear, a message containing transfer-speed information appears
9. The download process begins and the firmware is updated on the product. This can take several minutes. Let the process finish without further interaction with the product or the computer
The printer will automatically turn off and then on again to activate the update; this can happen more than once. At the end of the update process, the READY message appears on the control panel. Do not turn off the product or interfere with the update until you see this message
10. Print a configuration page and verify that the firmware revision number matches the revision of the current update
11. At the command prompt, type bye to exit the FTP command
12. Then type exit to close the command prompt window
Me, Myself and IT 